


Zero-Hour

by audaxfemina



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Not Beta Read, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2019-05-04 12:56:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 42,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14593488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audaxfemina/pseuds/audaxfemina
Summary: All the Infinity War Spoilers.  Summary inside to prevent spoilers.Zero-hour was the moment that changed everything that came after.  Our heroes pick up the pieces.Rating is for language.  Post IW brings out my spontaneous Tourette's.





	1. Endgame

**Author's Note:**

> This story begins immediately after Thanos' dubious victory in IW. If you've seen it, you know why I felt like MCU just ripped my heart out and crushed it. This is my attempt to get closure before they 'fix' it in IW2. 
> 
> We'll see how it goes. I know how my story ends. 
> 
> I hate posting WIPs, but I'm hoping to update this one fairly regularly. Comments and kudos feed the author, so please... enjoy.

Tony sat down hard enough to jar his stab wound, but it was far from the only pain he was feeling at the moment. Everything hurt like he’d gone ten rounds with a Sherman tank. He was thirsty, he was tired, his suit was toast. There was blood on his lips, dust under his fingernails and bile rising to his mouth. All the nightmares Tony had ever lived about this day weren’t remotely close to the devastation he’d just experienced. 

Strange was gone, floating away on the wind like the sorcerer he was, but Peter? Peter was the worst catastrophe of all.

Peter Parker should never have been on Titan to begin with. He should have been in physics, not trying to defy physics by flying an alien ship. He should never have died alone on a dead world with only Tony for comfort.

This was everyone’s worst nightmare, and he’d never dreamed it would be this bad. Over fourteen million scenarios, and they lost in every single scenario but one. This? This felt like a massive and irredeemable failure. 

He raked both hands through his hair, taking a shaky breath in the thin, noxious atmosphere and looking to the only living being on the planet besides him. Well, he used that term loosely. She looked like one hell of a cyborg. 

“Are you finished grieving yet?”

“I haven’t even begun,” he replied though a dry mouth. Tony needed to get up, he needed to get moving, to do something. Even with the grit that covered him, he was desperately itching to fix everything. 

“I am sorry about your child. But if you don’t wish to join him, we need to come up with a plan.”

He sighed heavily and then said, “He was never supposed to be here. I sent him home and he followed anyways. Chances are good if he was on Earth, he would have died just the same, though.”

“That’s correct. Half the universe is now dead, a random chance equivalent to the flip of a coin decided who survived. My sister is dead. We lost, and Thanos has his victory.”

Victory. He had always hate that word. It was like ‘perfect’ and ‘never.’ It was final, fixed and constant, something that couldn’t be changed. 

It was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. 

This wasn’t a cave in Afghanistan, but Tony knew his back was against the wall now just the same way as before. Strange had put it there. He’d traded the stupid Time Gem for Tony’s life. Why? It didn’t make any sense! Why did the stone get sacrificed for Tony especially after the arrogant ass had declared that it would never be a trade he’d make? No one wanted to sacrifice for him, not anymore. 

He was used to being told he was found wanting, that he needed to make the sacrifice play. He wasn’t the guy for whom the play was made, which made him uneasy. What could he do that Gandalf couldn’t? He’d watched the guy fight, for fuck’s sake. He wasn’t a slouch.

There had to be a reason. What hadn’t Tony done yet? Why was he important enough to tip the balance in their favor? About fourteen million questions raced through his brain, momentarily tying up every iota of computing power that he possessed.

“Maybe not,” Tony replied speculatively. Why hadn’t the idiot sorcerer said something, anything, once Thanos had gone, before the world ended? Lay it out for him, idiot-style. A to-do list. Anything? He was missing data, and that never ended well for anyone. Missing data had led to Afghanistan, Sokovia, the Mandarin.

“You call this a victory?” she sneered, dark eyes fixed on Tony’s face as though it were a gravity well.

“Oh, no, this is a hit. But Thanos hasn’t sunk my battleship. Not yet. Thanos is not going to see this coming. He’s probably on a beach somewhere sipping a Mai Tai thinking he’s won everything.” 

“He’s been on this quest for a hundred years. He has invaded and slaughtered dozens of planets, he has destroyed stars. What do you think he hasn’t considered in all of his planning?” she asked derisively.

Tony flicked a glance at the woman and said, “The greatest thing I get in this job is when I can get a villain to monologue. Gives me an idea of their plans and lets me catch a breather. Win-win. Thanos did that. Thanos told us how this world was bleak and wanting and how miserable everyone was until he decided to suggest genocide as a viable population control alternative to condoms.”

She snorted and looked away. 

“Thanos told us just about everything, including what he’d do when he won. But you know and I know something he doesn’t. We know that he didn’t end the war today. He thinks it’s over, that he’s just going to sit there and bask in the love of a joyful universe? It is *just* beginning,” he said. “Because he killed half the universe, and do you know what I know about the other half? If they are anything like me, if they have seen that the cost of defeat is insurmountable and horrific? If they love *anyone*, feel empathy for anyone? The entirety of the remaining universe are all severely pissed off.”

But now, they had a hope in hell. The Avengers, when things went right for them, they were a mess. Too many agendas, too many priorities all battling with one another until the day was very nearly lost. Chaos in planning, execution - it was a logistical nightmare and how Fury had been so lucky in years past was beyond Tony’s ability to reason. Give the Avengers a focus, on the other hand, and they could move mountains. When they stopped Loki the first time, they had Coulson to avenge and an alien army to fight. Well, now Tony was pretty sure that everyone left had someone to avenge. He sure as shit did.

At the moment, stranded on a planet who the hell knew how far from Earth, that was pretty much *all* he had. Him, a blue woman who held herself about like Natasha rather than Vision, and a whole lot of fuck all else besides a destroyed suit and a nearly mortal wound.

But how was it that Jarvis, the old, actual human Jarvis had put it? 

_Master Tony, you are the most brilliant man I’ve ever met and I firmly believe that you could turn the universe on its head if only you remember that there is no situation that is truly beyond salvation as long as you haven’t exhausted every good idea._

He’d gotten over the roadblocks and got Dum-E functional, he could work through this. So think, Stark. What now? Practical steps. Since Friday was still offline, he’d have to do this shit the old-fashioned way, even if it gave him a rash. 

Step one, assess the situation. Stranded, alien planet, devoid of life and oh, yeah, surrounded by the dead bodies of humans and aliens alike. Moving on. What happened on Earth? 

Step one-a. Get to Earth from wherever the hell this place was. That would also fulfill step two, medical attention before he croaked all the same. “How did Captain Moron and his idiot squad get to this wreck of a celestial body in order to fuck up everything?”

She didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the description. Clearly, she shared the sentiment of both the people and the situation. “They have a ship. The Milano. It’s capable of interstellar travel.”

Iron Man could work with that. “Alright. We need transport and they aren’t going to use it any time soon. Can you pilot it?” He succumbed to coughs, feeling more blood in his mouth. Damn.

As if the question itself was the height of intergalactic insult, the woman shifted her weight defiantly before answering. “Of course, I can. Where did you have in mind?”

“Earth. You think this particular situation is bad, I have done far more with far less. I am going to become that California raisin’s biggest nightmare, and I’m going to fix this.”

Nebula looked at the ash on the wind that had been humans and aliens alike. “Really? How?”

“The Avengers, might have heard of them? They’ve got superpowers. Super strength, gigantic hammer, freaky mystical powers of doom. You know what my superpower is, Smurfette? I’m an engineer. I build things from scratch, I improve on them when they fail and I fix things when they break. I have built the most complex computer systems ever imagined, I have built prosthetic limbs that are indistinguishable from the real thing, and I made the most highly advanced weaponry my planet has ever seen. I gave that last one up for a reason. Mankind didn’t need a better way to kill each other. But it isn’t just about mankind anymore. This is about taking the fight to a megalomaniacal grape who stole the most important parts of our lives from us because of some sacred bullshit quest that should never have been allowed to happen in the first place.”

“It did happen.”

“It happened because right now, the universe as a whole seems to only recognize one kind of strength, and that is brute force. There are others, and I’m going to prove that. I am going to be his ending; I am going to do everything in my power with my last joule of energy to scatter that infestation’s component molecules over half of the cosmos because he deserves it. Because that nuke we threw at the Chitauri that destroyed the fleet about to invade our planet? I could have built one of those when I was a third of the kid’s age. I have half a universe full of reasons to move heaven and earth to make this right. I only need the one.”

He looked at the devastated planet around them, the shattered moon in the sky. “Some asshole just broke the universe. I am going to fix it. You can either help me get back to Earth so that I can get started, or you can get out of my way. Drop me off if you want, stick around if you want, Earth’s not that bad for a backwater, our resident thunder god has said. Your choice, but those relatively big pieces of that moon he threw at us are still headed down; so, it’s going to get very uncomfortable for the both of us very quickly. Tick-tock.” 

She snorted and reached out with her more humanoid hand. Lifting him to his feet like a child, she easily put his arm over her shoulders. “This way.”

Each step was something akin to agony and by the time that he was eased down onto a seat in the ship, the haziness in his vision was not something he could ignore. She strapped him in securely and then flipped a few switches. The ship shuddered to life, taking them from nightmarish devastation to limitless black and then she was back, injecting him with a painkiller and a few other drugs. 

Some time later, he blinked his eyes open at a touch to his shoulder and saw the perfect green and blue marble hanging in front of his face. 

“Which landmass do I need to set down on?”

“Can you detect any signs of a battle or alien incursion?” he asked through a dry mouth.

“There is a great deal on fire in *that* location,” she said, gesturing to Africa.

Tony blinked and said, “Well, at least it wasn’t New York. Again. Head for the smoking crater. I’ve got a pretty good feeling my friends will be there if they’re still alive.”

She nodded and began their initial descent. “Will they assume we’re hostile?”

“Probably not. Hey, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Nebula.” 

“I’m Tony-”

“I didn’t miss it when my father said your name, like it was something to be remembered.” Her dispassionate glance returned to the course and direction. “You’ve faced him before.”

“I threw a nuke at his army the last time he tried to invade Earth.”

That got her full attention. “You destroyed half the Chitauri invasion fleet.”

“I wasn’t even trying for complete decimation that day.” Tony smirked, an echo of the normal confidence he projected. He knew it was a hollow comfort. “I didn’t have a phenomenally good reason to kill that son of a bitch yet,” he explained. 

Her fingers stilled over the controls and she said, “I do.”

“Yep, figured that from the way you showed up.” Tony flicked open the communication channels, getting mostly static on the other end. “The debris field is going to get a little more intense up here for a bit. We have a thing for littering in space.”

Two channels in, he got a hit on something familiar and started tapping at the keyboard for a few moments. “Veronica, there you are.”

“Veronica?”

“Veronica is one of my satellites. She’s not primarily communication but she’ll do.” He tapped at a few things and then cleared his throat. “Pssst. Rhodey.”

There was a minor delay, and then that familiar voice, the one who’d welcomed him in from the desert, responded. “Jesus, Tony. Where are you?”

“Headed back. I’m on an alien ship. Why are you in Africa?”

“Brought Vision here for protection,” Rhodey explained. “We’re in Wakanda.” 

“Big pile of flaming wreckage?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, I can see it from space. Looks like you had more fun than we did, but we didn’t get an army invading. We just got that asshole Thanos by himself. He got the Time Stone.”

“He got everything,” Rhodey replied. “We’re in some deep shit, man. *Deep* shit.”

“If you’re referencing the annihilation of half the universe, we may have noticed something,” Nebula answered, dodging a football sized piece of Mir. 

“Rhodey,” he stated, taking a deep breath. 

“What, Tones?”

“I have a plan.” Tony snorted. “I also have a severe laceration in the torso, so we’re going to be coming in hot. Please don’t let them shoot us down.” 

“Tony, prove it.”

He winced. “Don’t make me say it.”

“Tony.”

“War Machine is my hero, asshole.”

“Close enough.” 

“Okay, about to pass out, see you on the ground, Rhodey.” He flicked the switch over his friend’s protest. “God, this sucks.”

“Thanos could have finished the job,” Nebula muttered. 

“Wow, you’re such an optimist.”

“Or he could have tortured you like he did me.”

Ice water went down his spine. “Yeah, torture sucks. See that place over there?”

She flicked a glance to the Middle East. 

“That’s where my father figure paid the Ten Rings to kidnap and torture me for three months. I came out with shrapnel in my heart, a hole the size of both fists in my chest and seventy dead terrorists. I also came out with the first Iron Man suit and a reason for not letting the treachery go.” Tony smiled, something slightly more akin to his Merchant of Death smile. “So, I get vengeance, trust me, I do. But if you or anyone else screws up my chance to make it right? I will make Thanos look like a saint. You heard Strange. One in fourteen-million chance to win and I had to survive in order for it to work. I don’t like the odds, but I’m going to make it count.” 

“You didn’t tell your friend about what the sorcerer said.”

“No. Maybe in private, but the others wouldn’t believe it. I’m known for having a massive ego.”

“You fought a Titan and lived. Maybe you should start believing it’s justified,” she answered, swooping them lower into the atmosphere. 

He smirked, and laid his head back against the seat, dozing in and out until the craft came to a stop on terra firma. He tugged at the restraints, nearly pitching forward as Nebula moved to help him again. 

“One person is never going to be able to defeat Thanos alone,” he explained. “I’ve got a plan, but it’s going to take everyone. Want to help me destroy him?”

“With pleasure,” she hissed viciously as she led him from the ship once more.


	2. Return and Regroup

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which certain parties return to Earth, Rhodey doesn't let Steve misunderstand the situation and Thor falls back to Shakespearean speech more than once. It's okay, Thor. We understand; you're a little stressed.
> 
> Unbeta-ed, so if there's any glaring error, please drop me a line.

* * *

There wasn’t much for him to do at this point. It was like no one had ever seen anything like Rocket before, but considering Quill’s repeated asshole nicknames, he knew that was wrong. That was one thing he had to say about the Asgardian. They might have rescued him out in the black, but at least the guy was making sure that Rocket wasn’t messed with here on Quill’s home planet.

For all he knew, Terrans ate things that looked vaguely like him. Quill weren’t real clear on that.

Thor knelt in front of him, eyes on the firearm cradled in his lap. “One of our friends has been in contact and is returning to Earth. As he is not alone in returning, it was decided I should go and meet this craft to ensure that the other is not foe. Given your experience in realms other than Yggdrasil, I would welcome your expertise. And your firepower.”

Rocket blinked minutely and then said, “What the hell? I got nothing else to do but make these primates nervous.”

He wasn’t as much of a mountain as Groot or Drax, but Thor was big, and he was trying to make himself non-threatening. The Asgardian sighed softly and conceded, “The people of this world are unused to visitors, and those they have faced have not been nearly as hospitable and kind as you have been to me. I hope that you are able to forgive them their caution and remember their kindness once they have accepted you as friend as well as ally.”

“You have to apologize for them a lot?”

“Usually, it is they who must apologize for me,” Thor replied with a disarming smile. “This world has many strange customs and mortals are offended by many things that an Asgardian would find irrelevant. The most open-minded of the lot is he who is returning. His name is Stark and he is an inventor and craftsman of the highest order. His technology oft seems as though it is magic.”

“Has he made a ship that can travel in space?”

“I wouldn’t put it past him, though I have been absent for several years.”

Grudgingly, Rocket got to his feet. “Alright. Let’s go be the welcome party. But I do want to get back to my ship, so if there’s a chance-”

“If there is a chance for you to find the remainder of your family, Rocket, I should be the last person in the cosmos to begrudge you the opportunity.”

Yeah, he would be. “I’m glad your friends are alive, if the rest of your family is dead.”

“Most are, that is a comfort,” Thor offered, gesturing to the door that led to a courtyard.

“I mean, we knew for a fact that Thanos was bad news, but I guess we figured we had time.” 

“How?”

“Gamora is Thanos’ daughter. That’s part of why we knew about him, and why she was sent after the Power Stone on Xandar to begin with. That’s how we all ended up trying to kill each other because she was supposed to take the stone to dear old Dad. Of course, she didn’t *want* to. What moron wants to help someone kill half the universe and hope that you don’t end up in the crossfire?”

“So, who had the stone?”

“We gave it to Nova Corps after we kicked Ronan’s ass. Figured it was safer there than with us, but considering he got a hold of it, maybe not so much,” Rocket offered. 

“I doubt anywhere was truly safe. If the Aether and the Tesseract were not safe in Asgard’s most secure vaults, there was no place in the universe where it could be safely concealed forever.” Thor reached down and picked up Rocket before swinging his axe. One thing he’d never quite get used to is watching this guy fly. Another thing was nearly losing his lunch… flying with Thor. Rocket nearly stumbled to lose his lunch as Thor dropped him to the ground. The shimmering perimeter of the shield winked as it was partially opened and Rocket blinked twice. He knew that ship. 

“How the hell did your friend get aboard the Milano?” Rocket demanded, hefting his rifle a bit higher. “That’s *our* ship.”

“I know not, friend Rocket,” the Asgardian replied as the door opened and two figures slowly moved outside of the somewhat battered, but still intact, ship. 

It wasn’t until they rounded the corner that Rocket recognized the second. “Nebula?” he asked incredulously. 

“Obviously,” she gritted, walking an injured Terran closer. 

“Stark,” Thor breathed thankfully. “Tis good to see you alive.”

“Yeah, ditto, Point Break,” the human answered in breathy tones. “Thor, this is Nebula. She’s the one who scraped me up off Titan after everything.” 

The Terran was ashen, almost gray in complexion and given what he knew of humans from Quill, yeah. He didn’t look good. Red oozed out onto what looked like some of the bandages from the Milano.

Thor started for a moment and then apparently remembered his manners. “This is friend Rocket, one of the Guardians of the Galaxy. You arrived aboard his ship.”

The Terran peered down at him and frowned minutely. “You are *not* what I expected from outer space,” Stark conceded.

“I get that a lot,” Rocket replied. “Just don’t call me a raccoon and we’ll be cool.”

The Terran shrugged minutely and said, "Doable, Rocky."

“How came you to be injured?”

“Thanos stabbed him,” Nebula explained. 

The skies darkened minutely against the bright sunshine and clouds swirled overhead. “He shall not escape justice for this atrocity.” 

“Thor, buddy,” the Terran said, reaching out with an unsteady hand. “I’m injured, miserable and pissed the fuck off. I don’t really want to be wet too. Shade’s fine, it felt like we were on the surface of the sun, but no downpours.” 

At that simple touch, the dark clouds dispersed, leaving them once more in the humid sunshine.

“You are Asgardian,” Nebula stated speculatively.

“The last,” he confirmed sadly. “Thanos slaughtered that which remained of my people: man, woman and child. Including my brother, Loki. We had reconciled.”

Stark winced. “I’m sorry to hear that, Thor. I can’t…”

“It is my fondest hope that you shall never know the depths of my anguish, friend Stark.” He moved closer and took the Terran’s weight from Nebula. “You have my thanks for returning our friend to us, Nebula.” 

The Terran went even whiter if that was possible, and his knees buckled.

“Stark,” Thor blurted. 

“That looks like an adrenaline crash,” Rocket opined.

“He has been drifting in and out of consciousness since we left Titan,” Nebula answered. “It’s the only time he shut up.”

Yeah, that’d drive her nuts. The raccoon decided to ask. “Nebula, what about the others? Gamora? Quill?”

“Thanos murdered my sister for the Soul Stone,” she conceded. 

Stark blinked for a moment and then said, “Quill, that’s the human guy, right?” 

“Half-Terran, yeah.”

Yeah, he knew that expression, and even through the guy’s pain, he was trying not to mention what a dip-shit Quill was. Rocket had a very intimate understanding. “Whatever you got to say, I ain’t immune to the guy’s faults. He has a lot of them.”

“They’re all dead,” Thanos’ psychotic daughter explained. 

“All of them?” Rocket blurted incredulously. A thousand curses welled up in his head, and some of them started coming out of Rocket’s mouth unbidden. Everything Yondu had warned him about, it happened. He was left completely alone.

“Hey, I’ve been stabbed, but you don’t look so good,” Stark stated. 

He looked up at the human and said, “My entire family just died today. Groot died here on Earth after Thanos won."

Thor’s meaty hand settled on Rocket’s shoulder and squeezed gently. Yeah. That was a guy who understood. "This tragedy has claimed many and left much heartache and chaos in its wake. None are alone in their loss."

He actually had no place in the universe to go, to look for anyone. If the others were gone, what did it matter that the Milano was here? 

The Terran offered a shaky sigh before changing the subject slightly. “Anyone check on Pepper? Fury?”

“We are in a land called Wakanda that is highly advanced. We can certainly try.”

“Try? That should have been our first damned step,” the man blurted incredulously. “We need resources, communication and coordination. Please tell me that in the eight some hours since everything went to shit, someone started doing damage control, because I am not in the mood for being the voice of rational decision-making at the moment.” 

“What are you in the mood for?” Rocket asked, narrowing his eyes as he glared up at the human. He wasn’t really in the mood either.

As if he was truly looking at Rocket for the first time, the man’s brown eyes bored into him with an inner fire that he could truly appreciate. “I’m in the mood for reducing that overgrown grape to his subatomic particles and then feeding the debris to a neutron star that gets sucked into a black hole. And if I’m feeling really vindictive, I’m going to set fire to his corpse first *after* I let Nebula here do her worst. Sound good to you, Ranger Rick?” 

Okay. This guy, he could deal with. No platitudes, no ‘it’s going to be okay.’ It wasn’t going to be alright, not if the others were dead. No, this guy flat out planned Thanos’ bloody and excruciating death and that was something that Rocket could absolutely get behind. “Yeah, that sounds pretty good.”

“But first, first, we are going to get our family back, because I am not letting this shit stand for one femtosecond longer than I have to. Getting our priorities in order-”

“Maybe the fragile, mortally wounded Terran would like to start with a healer before he has to waste time building himself new internal organs,” Nebula sassed. 

“Like it would take me more than five minutes,” he snarked. 

“Stark, how did you end up leaving this planet in the first place?”

The human sighed heavily and rolled his eyes like the last thing in the universe he wanted to do was recount the past day or two. “Two of Thanos’ henchmen came to New York. We fought, tore a lot of things up but this one guy kidnapped a wizard, name of Strange.”

“The Sorcerer Supreme,” the god blurted. “We met on a previous visit to Earth.”

“Yeah, I saw, you and Loki were trending on Twitter and then you dropped off the face of the Earth, again.” His tone made it seem like it was a regular occurrence.

"The hell is Twitter?" Rocket interjected.

Thor flinched minutely. “'Tis a very long story. Did you save him?”

Stark shook his head. “Save is kind of a relative word these days. Spider-Man and I got him free, but we still ended up on Titan, and lo and behold, we lost. They died, I didn’t.” 

”Yet,” Nebula answered tersely.

As if mortally offended instead of mortally wounded, Stark turned to face her with an incredulous expression. “You are the biggest ray of sunshine in the universe, aren’t you?” 

She shifted her weight like she was about to punch him and then said, “You’re only arguing with me because you know I’m right.”

The sigh that followed was all-consuming and capped off with a series of wet coughs that were capped off with the guy spitting blood on the ground. “I *really* hate that guy,” the Terran muttered hoarsely.

“Yeah, get in line,” Rocket retorted hotly.

Stark shook his head weakly as if resigned to the notion. “That’s what I’m trying to avoid. I don’t… I have the start of a plan, which is like ninety percent better than anyone else’s, but, I don’t have the whole picture, Thor. I don’t know what Strange wanted, why he sacrificed-"

The God blinked, and said, “Sacrifice?”

That was a wince, like one of Quill’s. Stark must not have planned to give that away. “The drugs were such a bad idea, Nebula." He shook his head and then continued. "He exchanged the Time Stone to keep Thanos from finishing me off,” Stark explained. “I told him not to do it, but he did it anyway.”

Rocket tugged at his right ear in confusion and nervousness. “Well, then, why would be the operative question. Because giving that maniac the stone just obliterated half the people on this planet.”

“Half the people in the universe,” Nebula corrected.

As though he was used to settling arguments, the thunder god broke in calmly. “The wisdom of a sorcerer cannot be overlooked. He is wise, wiser so than my brother ever was, and he had seen more of the universe than my mother and Heimdall combined. Strange did naught without reason, I am certain of it,” the god of thunder reasoned gently, catching Rocket’s gaze as he did so.

Stark stiffened slightly. “Your faith is going to give me hives.”

The crooked smile got fonder as Thor considered his answer. “As it generally does, Stark. It is grave tragedy that Strange is dead. We could have used his counsel.”

“Yeah. There are more sorcerers. One called Wong. I got the feeling that he knew the score. We should find him.” He paused while flicking a glance at Nebula, and then said, “Strange told me that he’d used the Time Stone to see over fourteen million possible outcomes and that we only won in *one* of them. Would have been nice for him to, you know, share with the rest of the class before he died.” 

Thor looked troubled, and when that guy looked troubled, yeah… those weren’t great odds. 

“And yet he informed you that this ridiculous course of action was the only way,” Nebula interjected. “So at least you have a hint.”

Thor smiled somewhat sadly. “Well said, fair Nebula. Come, Stark, let us tend to your wounds.” He swept Stark up in his arms in a manner that the smaller man protested, and nodded to both. “We have food and lodging in the palace. If it is your wish to stand with us against Thanos’ tyranny, please stay, that we may forge our path together.”

With that, he turned and took off with the axe, leaving Rocket and Nebula standing in the middle of a field like jackasses. 

“Yeah. He’s always like that,” he excused. “You honestly think these losers have a shot at taking down Thanos?”

“That Terran destroyed half the Chitauri race six years ago.”

“Wait, he’s the guy? He doesn’t look like much.” Rocket scrubbed at his face with his hands. “So, do you have a plan?”

“I like his; what I've heard of it so far,” Nebula confessed. “I’m not convinced he’s a hero, but seems like he’s at least ten thousand times more intelligent than Quill, and he’s got more motivation than most men put together. If that’s true, he will be Thanos’ end, and I can’t wait to see that happen.”

That’d work. “A hero’s not what we need. We need a fucking miracle.”

“He might be good for that too.” 

With another longing look at the Milano, he sighed and faced the palace. “C’mon, it’s not a long walk, but you can tell me what the fuck happened today.”

* * *

Steve rushed to the medical wing, finding assorted doctors hovering over an unconscious form. “How is he?” he asked Rhodes.

“He was less than twelve hours from bleeding out,” the colonel replied, his voice grim. “They had to sedate him to shut him up. He’s… I haven’t seen him this upset since Afghanistan, and considering how he turned the world upside down at that point, Tony Stark on the warpath is not a good thing.”

He raked a hand through his hair and said, “Where was he?”

“According to Thor and the woman who brought him back who is one of Thanos’ former assassin kids? Tony stowed away on an alien ship to a planetoid called Titan, which is Thanos’ homeworld. It’s a barren lifeless rock because that maniac managed to destroy it after they refused to go along with his holocaust. Jesus Christ, what a clusterfuck. I mean, I’m glad to have Tony back, but like this?”

For once, Steve was willing to let the language slide. Ever since Zero-Hour as it was called, he’d had low-simmering rage bubbling up in his chest. Ever since Bucky had disintegrated in front of him, Steve was both heartbroken and angry. 

There would be time for tears later. Grim determination was what carried the remaining Avengers through every moment. 

Knowing Tony, there’d also be time for some recriminations as well. He looked probably about as bad as Steve had felt after Siberia… two years was a long time to let things simmer, but Tony had never reached out, never called.

Tony still hadn’t been the one to call. It had been Bruce, but when the worst happened, Tony had still had the phone *with* him. 

That had to say something.

“Having him back is the most important thing,” Steve conceded. It had to be. On a day when they’d lost so much, any victory was something to hold onto. “After all we lost here on Earth, having Tony safe was a good thing.”

“It wasn’t just here, Captain,” Jim answered, sighing softly. “Tony said there were seven people on Titan. Two made it off alive. Looks like the odds were worse out there than they were in Wakanda, but the averages still hold at about half. Fifty percent of the universe went out in Zero-Hour. We still got lucky.”

Steve flicked a glance at the woman who stood at the far end of the surgical suite window, too preternaturally still for his comfort. 

“It shouldn’t have taken the end of the world for you two to get on the same page again.”

Rhodes and Steve hadn’t spoken since Leipzig, at least not at any length, and to be fair, it wasn’t as though they’d ever truly cleared the air. “No, it shouldn’t.”

“I’m real glad you showed up, Cap. Don’t get me wrong. Vision was in a tight spot and we might not have had the fighting chance we had. But it would probably have been a lot better if we hadn’t needed to get the band back together in the first place.” 

“Tony had the ability to get in touch with me.” 

Rhodes looked insulted on Tony's behalf. “He’s always had the ability to get in touch with you, even if you ended up in the South Pole. You think he didn’t know you came to Wakanda after you two fought Zemo? You left Tony in a broken suit in the middle of Siberia with no backup. Tony Stark would rather have ripped out his own rib-cage and worn it as a hat before calling you. Aliens came to New York, *again* and he didn’t call you on that insulting dinosaur of a phone which he probably had traced before he finished reading the damn letter.” Rhodes turned to him mildly and asked, “What does that tell you?”

That Tony was never going to be the one to bridge the gap, but he also didn’t hate Steve enough to bring him in. “I’d hoped that with time…”

“Yeah, if you think Tony was just going to get over the fact that Barnes killed his parents and you lied about it, you don’t know thing one about him. I’ve known him for almost thirty years now. The man can hold one hell of a grudge. Ask him about Tiberius Stone someday.” Rhodes rubbed at the back of his neck before saying, “It’s not going to be like it was. He’s going to work with you, there’s that. But he’s not going to consider you a friend, not any time soon. The scars are way too deep for that.”

Tony’s head lolled to the side, peaceful in a way that they could only hope for at the moment. There was a world of difference between sleep and unconsciousness, and the drugged oblivion Stark now rested in had to be better than this waking nightmare.

“I know,” Steve acknowledged with no small amount of regret. “About the Accords, I appreciate you not trying to arrest us.”

Rhodes was older than him in chronological age and life experience and at that moment, he looked it. “All these years, and you still don’t know my priorities. Let’s count them down, shall we? Number four is where the Accords sit. Number three is the law of the United States and my oath to the Air Force. Number two, the right thing to do.”

“Number one, Tony Stark,” Steve concluded. 

Rhodes nodded. “Ross called me up to bitch because Tony didn’t get prior authorization for taking on aliens in Manhattan even though it fell under the _in extremis_ clause and the sub-clauses on self-defense and defense of Earth. Iron Man is fine with the Accords, and they're not going to punish him. Ross just likes making our lives miserable because he can't get you and you're the Avenger he really wants. Tony would have told Ross where to shove it sideways if he had been on the planet or near-Earth orbit. I was in the process of doing that when you turned up. I’m not going to be in trouble for any of it, but even if I am, it’s a slap on the wrist. I’ve had enough of those on that man’s behalf; it’s a familiar scenario.”

“The Air Force isn’t going to court martial you, are they?”

“I got forcibly medically retired eighteen months ago,” Rhodes answered. “Spinal cord injury is a medical discharge, even if Tony keeps me walking. Moot point, Cap. Ross can complain all he wants to, but I’m not the one who’s supposed to arrest you, and I certainly wouldn’t have arrested you anyways when the world was in danger. I still think it is. It was just dumb luck that I had him on the line when you showed.”

They stood in silence, watching the doctors for a few moments before Rhodes said, “I didn’t say it before because I had other things on my mind like the end of the world, but you really ought to shave. The beard makes you look like a hobo.”

Steve blinked before giving into the urge to laugh. It wasn’t hysterical laughter, but… the kind of thing he’d missed in the years since their split. Tony would talk a person in circles. Rhodes cut straight to the point and didn’t pull any punches. When Steve was an idiot, Rhodes called him an idiot. It was clear why the man had risen to the rank of Colonel, because that was the kind of man most soldiers and airmen could respect. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it." 

After Siberia, Steve had Sam, but Wilson tended to say ‘yes, Cap’ where Rhodes would have looked at him evenly until Tony broke in and told him how dumb his plan was. As different as the Avengers had been after Sokovia, he’d missed their original composition. Maybe they hadn’t gotten on, but then again… neither had the Howlies. And they’d saved the world more than once.

Steve desperately hoped they had one more miracle in the tank.

The Asgardian walked closer, standing in a way that seemed to take up all the room that stood between them, metaphorically as well as physically. “I have spoken further with Lady Nebula. She is brusque but knew much of Thanos’ plans and what has occurred. We shall need to speak with her further, but I believe her to be a valuable ally. And Friend Rocket vouches for her prowess in battle.” He rested his hand on Rhodes’ shoulder and asked, “How is our friend?”

“They haven’t told me anything, but their hands aren’t in his chest anymore, so that’s probably a good thing.” He shook his head. “The hell happened to him?”

“He was stabbed by Thanos in the attempt to protect the Time Stone,” a cerulean woman rasped softly from further down the hall. “He’s only alive because he is stronger than you look.”

“That’s our Tony,” Rhodes confessed. “Thanks again for bringing him back.”

“He made an intriguing offer,” she conceded, watching the medical treatment with a detachment none of the others could quite match. “Best one I’ve had in a very long time.”

“What was it?” Steve asked.

“Vengeance,” she growled. 

The Avengers shared a look and then Thor continued his line of thought. “Stark mentioned a sorcerer who may be in New York, provided he has not been killed. His name is Wong. I may know where he is, or failing that, where to contact him. Strange and I met in New York and he helped me track down my father before his death.”

“Strange’s?”

“My father’s,” the demigod conceded. “I suppose, however, the full answer is ‘both.’ Strange lived on Bleecker Street.”

“In *Manhattan*?” Steve replied in disbelief. 

“Stark was not the reason for the incursion in New York. They wanted the Time Stone from Strange. Tony claimed he had the assistance of one called Spider-Man in freeing the sorcerer from his captivity, but he did not explain either the manner or the man who aided him. Is that a name known to you?”

Rhodes blanched. He slowly collapsed like his strings had been cut, and sank down to the floor with his head in his hands. 

“Spider-Man,” Steve recalled. “The mouthy kid from the airport?”

“Peter,” Rhodes replied forcefully. “Oh, God. His name was Peter.” 

“Was?”

“Thor, Tony came back from Titan without any other person from Earth.” He swallowed thickly and said, “Peter Parker was a seventeen year old high school student from Queens.” 

“Seventeen, then…”

“Yeah, you tried to drop a jet-bridge on a fifteen year old,” Jim informed him evenly. He brought both hands down to cover his mouth and looked at his oldest friend sadly. “Shit, no wonder he didn’t bring Peter up when I asked about Titan. Peter is an orphan, he goes to a science magnet school and he designed the chemical formula for the webbing he uses. The kid’s like Tony but without the antisocial behavior he had at MIT. He was a good kid. Peter didn’t deserve that.”

Nebula remained impassively staring at Tony, an unblinking stare tracking his breaths. “His child’s death was not quick.”

A shudder went through Steve’s body and he looked to Thor, who seemed unable to process that level of horror. 

The outcome of their battle with Thanos was simply not fathomable across the board. Everyone had lost someone. Rhodes had worried incessantly since Tony’s disappearance, it was only with his return that the colonel began to breathe easier. Now, it seemed that Tony had been the one to lose. 

But the others who died, it was so quick, so fleeting that some may not have even realized it. Bucky had barely been able to say anything before he fell apart. To have a protracted death, to know what was happening, must have been utterly terrifying. Steve didn’t want to think about it.

The Wakandan physicians began bandaging the wound on Tony’s chest, swathing the angry wound in a sea of sterile white. 

“Did he have any family in Queens?” Steve finally asked.

“His Aunt. I’ll… I’ll have to call her, if she made it.” Rhodes accepted Thor’s assistance to return to his feet as one of the medical personnel stepped out from the doorway. 

“Colonel Rhodes,” she greeted gently. “Mister Stark is responding well to treatment. Your friend is very strong, and he should make a full recovery in time.”

“How bad was it?”

“The blade entered through the left side of his chest in some deep scar tissue, breaking three ribs in front as well as back, missing the heart, but nicking the lung and liver. This caused a considerable amount of bleeding. We have transfused him with three units of blood. In addition, he has a concussion, a ruptured spleen, two hairline fractures in his left hand and several painful contusions. We have begun antibiotics in an attempt to prevent infection, but given that his injuries occurred outside of this planet, we have no way of knowing what sort of pathogens we may encounter.”

Jim nodded and said, “You can only do what you can do. If it helps, he’s been in worse shape before. How long before he’s up?”

“He should remain abed for at least a day.”

Moments passed as Rhodes looked at her evenly as though debating how to best break the information to this stranger. “Doctor, I do not believe you understand who Tony Stark is. The last time he sat still for more than six hours, he’d just undergone a heart transplant and was sedated for two days. He’s going to be pushing to be up in about two hours. Fair warning, you’re not going to keep him down long.”

She allowed a wry look. 

“I’ll sit on him as best I can, though. Thank you, Doctor.”

At that, the elegant physician nodded and gestured back. “You may sit with him, but do not wake him.” 

Rhodes nodded and thanked her again, before entering the treatment room to sit in a comfortable chair they’d moved in. He sank down, grabbing Tony’s hand as if to reassure himself that his friend was still alive, that he’d survived the most horrific event in human history.

Most of them weren’t so lucky. Thor settled a hand on Steve’s shoulder and the patted it meaningfully. “As I told Stark, Thanos’ crimes shall not stand. We shall find a way to make this right, Captain.” 

Steve shook his head and crossed his arms. “I don’t know how. Thanos got away, we don’t know where he is or how to find him. This was unlike anything we were prepared to face, Thor.”

“The danger of the stones were not something I was adequately informed of, but I sought them anyway.” The demigod sighed. “I only wish I had found them sooner, learned of their import, done more. Aimed truer.”

“We all failed to stop him, Thor. It wasn’t your fault.”

“He slaughtered that which remained of my family and my people,” Thor explained. “I survived. I cannot find anyone else to blame save Thanos, and I have not been able to hold him to account.”

“Your family?”

“He strangled my brother after destroying everyone else. My mother has been dead for some time, my father died recently. Thanos thought me dead until we faced each other on Earth.” 

“Then it’s a good thing we’re all tougher than he planned on,” the soldier offered solemnly and then looked up as their host appeared at the end of the hall, flanked by the Dora Milaje who remained. 

The youthful Shuri, who was still barely more than a child, strode forward. She stopped only to survey Stark and Rhodes. “I had heard that Stark had returned.” For the first time since being informed of her brother’s death, the princess’ face held the merest glint of a smile, and she turned to face both Avengers. “I know that it has been a long day, and that both of you are tired, but the United Nations council is demanding answers from Wakanda, and some of them… I do not know the explanation well enough to give.”

Thor dipped his head in acknowledgement. “Aye, your Majesty,” the Asgardian replied. “For it is a long and very involved story that not all may have known before this day. It would be my honor to relay to your world leaders all I know of Thanos and what his deeds hath wrought.”

“I could help explain what we know.” Steve felt obliged to offer as well, but the instant the words left his mouth, he realized how well he’d be received. Wakanda had never taken the blame of sheltering him after Siberia and freeing the others from the Raft, but they’d also never denied it either. He was still a fugitive.

Her arched eyebrow seemed exactly like her brother’s, and well, he knew Shuri well enough to know what she wasn’t saying to him. Evidently, even a crisis like this wasn’t enough to distract the UN from his two years on the lam.

“Ideally, if you could placate them, Thor, until such time as we have managed to concoct a plan of action, I would be most grateful. I abhor public speaking.”

“I have stood before some of the most formidable courts in the universe, your Majesty. It would be my honor to do so again on this day so that you may better see to the needs of your people.” He bowed minutely. “Though I cannot speak to what occurred elsewhere, to recount the battle is simple enough.”

“Nakia, please show Thor to the communications hub,” Shuri offered. “Captain, we could use your help in attempting to ensure that the perimeter of the city is secure. Some scouting groups have reported more of those creatures in the forest.”

“Gladly, your majesty.” 

“I would rather join you both, but I have an emergency council meeting to attend. Okoye, when Doctor Stark wakes, I would know immediately.”

Both Dora nodded and Shuri turned to depart, acting as regally as her brother had. 

It was sad to see that the girl he’d watched grow up under her brother’s wing was now having to act in his stead, but Zero-Hour had changed everyone. 

Thor squeezed Steve’s arm and departed. 

Steve watched as Rhodes took his friend’s hand and broke down into tears at the gift he’d been given. 

They all needed another chance. Steve intended to be certain that they got one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good news, everyone! I have the last chapter all written, and the next chapter after this one almost ready to go. Now it's just a matter of linking them all together in a way that makes sense. Yeah. At least I have a plan?
> 
> Still rated for language, because Rocket's decided to be a jackass. Wait. No, that wasn't a decision, he just is.


	3. Clean-up on Every Aisle.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which certain parties have to be reassured, stragglers are atomized and the International Society for Prodigies claims another member.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good news, we finally catch most people up with what happened and hopefully it gets faster from here. Because I'm headed out of town for about the next week, I wanted to get this settled and posted before I headed out. Might have the next chapter next Wednesday, but I make no promises since I'm not the one in charge of my little jaunt, so this one is a bit longer than the previous chapters.
> 
> Anyway, yes. Hope you stick out the boring stuff, because the next chapter is the last one that's IW-fallout heavy and then we get to fixing the universe. I can't wait for that, but, um... the Avengers brought all of their baggage. More baggage than would fill a triple-7. 
> 
> Hope you don't mind that Thor skipped most of it, because honestly, we saw the movie. (I saw it once so if I muff any details up, that's why. I was only going to let Marvel rip my heart out once this month. That's why I saw Deadpool2 instead.)

* * *

The communications hub was slightly different from what Thor remembered of Stark Tower, and although it seemed similar, he was content to let the Dora operate the technology. With a tablet in hand, it was easy enough to take the information and relay details about the battle and their losses. After recounting exactly what had led to the catastrophe, he paused. 

“And that was when we lost them.”

The UN representatives seemed horrified. 

“There was an interstellar war for these gems that we knew nothing about?”

“We knew with Sokovia, when the Vision was created, that the Mind Stone was on Earth. When we learned what the Tesseract was during the first days of the Avengers, we knew that it had been here for a very long time. This war was brought to your doorstep when those Stones came to Earth over the centuries. We had no idea the extent of the conflict, nor the cost. Even my father knew nothing of the Stones’ locations or that Thanos could get his hands upon them.”

“But this Thanos did,” the French ambassador concluded.

“Yes, he did. From what our allies have told us, this is not a calamity solely confined to the planet Earth. One-half of the universe has perished this day.”

The room went silent again. It must have been unfathomable for these leaders who had known little if anything of the galaxy outside their own solar system, but for Thor, it was a truly sobering thought.

“What resources do you have, Mister Odinson?” the Secretary-General asked, voice firm. “And what are your needs?”

“As of now, we have the full might of the nation of Wakanda and the support of her Regent, Shuri. We may need more than that, but the planning is in the very early stages for a counterstrike.” 

“Princess Shuri has been named Regent? What of King T’Challa?”

“Zero-hour,” he conceded. “Her Majesty is unwilling to contribute to a succession controversy should he be found. Regent Shuri claims there is precedent and despite intense pressure from her advisory council, she refuses to ascend beyond the position of regent. She has the full and unbridled support of those whose counsel she trusts, and we will continue to back her stance.”

One of the representatives winced, and Thor could only imagine it was Wakanda’s emissary. 

“Have you been in contact with any of the Avengers?”

“All that we could gather are in Wakanda at this time. Colonel Rhodes and Captain Rogers brought the Vision here to be protected so that the Mind Stone could be destroyed, and unfortunately, that plan failed. According to the survivors, Falcon, Maximoff, Vision and the Winter Soldier are among the dead. Captain Rogers, Black Widow, War Machine and Iron Man have survived. We are regrouping, but according to Captain Rogers, none have been in contact with either Ant Man or Hawkeye as they returned to the United States.” 

“Stark is back?” the American ambassador blurted out in shock. “Oh, thank God.”

It was good to know that others were concerned for his shield-brothers. “Aye, Iron Man pursued the foe from New York in an attempt to save one abducted by Thanos’ henchman, faced the Titan on another world and returned injured, but alive.”

“That certainly explains the damage in New York and in Edinburgh. If the aliens were after specific individuals, that was why the incursions were so limited and surgical in their precision. It certainly did little to dispel fear, however.”

“Exactly.” Thor paused and said, “We understand that you are beginning to assess the damage and we are formulating a plan of action at this time. When we know more, we will contact you further.”

“Any idea when that will be?”

“A few hours, at most. Stark is not one for lying down when there is work to be done,” Thor answered firmly. “As he was the mostly gravely wounded among us, I am certain that after that point, we will have more information to offer you and your member nations.” 

“It would be greatly welcomed. I won’t say there are riots in New York, but there is definite unease. When half the world’s population simply vanished after another alien visit, religious zealots began to proclaim the Rapture, the conspiracy theorists believe we’re responsible. This cataclysm is beyond our ability to deal with. We have countries destabilized by the loss of their potentates, royal families the world over have lost their members… the world economy is collapsing.” The American ambassador shook her head and flicked a glance at her compatriots.

“This was no judgment of a vengeful God, this was no conspiracy. From what Thanos told our allies, his entire crusade was predicated on the goal of eliminating half the life in the universe. Thanos came from an overpopulated world where instead of expanding outward to colonize new worlds or seek ones’ fortunes elsewhere, he proposed random genocide to eliminate hunger and want. The assumption he made was that the universe would be grateful for an end to scarcity, but that is not how humans live. You are not grateful for murder, you are heartbroken and outraged as I. The English name you ascribe to your race, humanity? That is also a synonym for charity, compassion, generosity and caring. It is feeding the hungry and healing the sick, building today for a better tomorrow. If you see a need, you fight to meet it, not to make the need go away by extinguishing another’s life. Your humanity is the noblest of attributes and the brightest light in the darkest days, for it is your greatest gift to each other and to the universe. It is courage in the highest form to love without regard to cost, and it is all that will carry this planet through these horrific times.”

Each on the council looked as though he had offered them hope they had feared long gone. Each sat a bit straighter, as though some strength returned to them. 

The blond ducked his head quietly and then continued. “You have asked me what our next course of action is. In the absence of consultation with my comrades, I can offer you no more than platitudes and reassurance that we shall fight to return those taken from us. We understand your concern and your urgency, but there are answers we do not yet have, your excellency,” Thor offered the American ambassador to the Security Council. “But if you must tell your people something, please consider these words. 

“Earth needed saving once before, and the Avengers were there, standing between the citizens of this world and a threat from above. We were scattered and divided before this conflict. Now we are battered, we are bruised, but we are here. We stand with you and mourn your losses as dearly as our own. Every corner of the universe has suffered such tremendous tragedies this day, there are not enough tears to be shed for all those who have been taken. But we cannot and shall not accept these circumstances as a certain fate. This injustice shall not stand. We shall fight for you once more, the Titan shall be brought to reckoning and we shall not fail Earth.”

The echoing stillness of the men and women on the other side was only broken by one woman who dabbed at her tears and with an accent similar to Thor’s own said, “The council is attempting to get in touch with all who signed the Accords. If we have others who are safe and willing to fight, may we contact you in the same manner, Thor?” 

“Of course, and we should welcome their strength. Allies from other worlds have rallied to our cause as well. Before I depart to seek the counsel of my comrades, I would thank you all for your patience and wisdom. Be sturdy and have faith, my friends, for the morning after this dark night shall come indeed.” 

He allowed them to cut the connection after they issued their farewells and stood for scant moments in the darkened communication room. 

“You speak well. You were raised a prince,” the princess’ bodyguard stated firmly.

“Aye, my lady. I was raised the first son of Odin, King of Asgard. But my people and my kingdom are dead. I am the last who has stood upon that homeworld, now gone.” 

“I have never heard anyone who is not of royal blood speak so.”

Thor shook his head minutely as if to dispel her erroneous assumption. “My father gave speeches that inspired. He led our people in battle, he argued treaties with Asgard’s allies and enemies. My mother, however, wielded words like swords. She was compassionate and warm when my father was distant. She cared so for our people; she would have truly wept for their ending. The All-Father was of royal blood in every way that mattered, but my mother was the one I looked to for guidance when a decision was difficult to swallow, when it was not clear-cut, when my heart threatened to overrule my head. My brother took more to the lessons of rhetoric than I did, but Thanos silenced Loki forever before he finished his gauntlet.” Loki would have made an excellent advisor and counsellor, had Asgard survived Hela’s assault, had it not fallen to Thanos. Had Loki not fallen by the Titan’s hand, his counsel would have aided Thor even to this day. “My brother would have been so much better suited to speak to your world representatives. He would have known what they needed to hear.”

Nakia took the tablet gently from Thor’s hand. “You spoke without pretense, honest and true. That was what they needed to hear, Your Majesty.”

“I am king of nothing,” Thor pointed out. “My homeworld is gone and my people are dead.”

“Nobility has nothing to do with land and everything to do with the heart. Her Majesty could learn much from your guidance,” she offered kindly. 

“And I will give her all the aid and support that she desires,” Thor conceded diplomatically. “Until her king’s return.”

She smiled and then gestured to the door once more. “You have faith.”

He’d once had faith in many things. In Asgard, in his people, in his friends, in his brother. All of that was gone now, stolen from the universe as though just memories remained. Thor bowed his head and thought on the halls of Valhalla. As a child, he’d dreamed of finding his place there, among the bravest of warriors to await the battle to end all battles. 

Now, he thought… perhaps entering the realm of his mother Folkvangr would be no shame. Those there were also fierce of heart and perhaps all the stronger, as it was not their sword arm that mattered. Concern, love? There were worse things to commend him to the afterlife. He’d mused on that more than once in the prior days, since the last of the Asgardians was slaughtered by Thanos. Perhaps it was there he should find his family. But not this day.

“At this point, faith and an axe are pretty much all I have, my lady.” 

“I have faith. And a spear,” Nakia conceded with a smile. “Your Majesty.”

* * *

Natasha sighed heavily, once more making her way out into the Wakandan jungle. It wasn’t her favorite place by any means, but over the past two years, she’d become far too familiar with this kingdom. It was hot, humid, full of every type of animal life she hated, and oh, yes. Now it was infested with aliens.

Even better.

“Thor is briefing the UN,” Steve informed her as he made his way to her side. His tone was morose and resigned, which said more than his words.

“Someone had to do it,” she replied. “Please tell me you’re not upset about not having to deal with bureaucratic nonsense today.”

Their fugitive status had been something they’d lived with for years, and although Natasha enjoyed something of the protection of anonymity and the fact that she hadn’t been outright named a fugitive from justice, it was still a bit hard to stomach. A part of her just wanted to go back home to the United States, to have a moment that wasn’t a mission, to not have to constantly watch her back again. It was familiar, several times over in her life she’d had nowhere to actually call home, nowhere to belong to. At least she still had Steve.

That didn’t mean that Natasha had to like it.

“The world just ended today, and I’m still a criminal.”

“The world has a very fickle memory. Give it a few days, Steve,” she counseled softly. “When all they can think of is the Accords, they’re not going to forgive and forget. When all they can think of is Zero-Hour… of a nameless, faceless evil that they can’t hope to beat, they’ll remember why they needed us in the first place. This is very likely to be our best shot to get a pardon for what happened in Europe. Starting over and earning their trust back is still a chance.”

His response was to look away, scanning the forest. Steve had only reluctantly come to the conclusion that perhaps they did need forgiveness for what had always seemed the right course of action. They were never going to move forward until he truly believed it.

Natasha frowned minutely, holding up one hand before drawing her firearm. 

“You shoot me, I ain’t gonna be happy,” the surly voice of the raccoon who’d arrived with Thor pronounced from above their heads. The sarcastic tone was all too familiar, and Natasha lowered the pistol.

Rocket was cute when he wasn’t holding a rifle that seemed almost larger than himself. He was draped over an overhanging branch, expression one of concern and yet wariness.

“Didn’t know anyone else was out here,” she offered in near-apology. “There have been some aliens spotted in this area of the forest.”

“Yeah, Outriders,” the raccoon explained, before shaking his head. “I’ve been tracking a pack of them for an hour or so. They went quiet about a minute before you two showed up, but the wind changed, so they could have caught your scent.”

“Not yours?” Steve asked, confusion showing through in his voice as he shifted his weight from foot to foot.

“There ain’t anything that smells like me in this entire forest, and given as they were invading your world, they wanted you as prey,” Rocket informed them, before sitting down on the tree branch he’d been standing on. “Outriders aren’t the brightest lights in the universe. They do exactly what they’re told, and they don’t think for themselves like we do. They get told to kill humans, that’s exactly what they’re going to do, regardless of the cost. They’re kind of dumb, but big and fast and hard to kill. That’s the way Thanos likes them.”

“Dumb?” Steve queried in confusion.

“Nah, the last three. His kids ain’t dumb,” he replied before sniffing hard. “Gamora always was smarter than the rest of my crew put together. Wait there. Don’t move.” He holstered his weapon on his back and scarpered off before either human could react.

His footsteps faded quickly and they were left to the ambient sounds of the forest. 

“Have you ever felt like somewhere, somehow, your life went fundamentally off the rails, and now you’re listening to a raccoon with a bazooka?” Steve asked softly.

“It’s been a very surreal day,” the Black Widow allowed. She shook her head. “Everything went sideways today, so listening to an ally we probably would have overlooked before is most likely the wisest course of action considering he’s trying to use us as bait.”

Steve blinked. “Bait?!” he hissed incredulously.

“Something’s coming,” she declared, drawing her other sidearm with a quick and discreet motion. 

Before the underbrush even moved, the loud bark of Rocket’s firearm atomized one of the Outriders, while another was quickly dispatched by Natasha’s concerted fire. She dropped both magazines out of her pistols and reloaded quickly. 

The fine mist of blood or ichor setted over both humans and Natasha just knew she’d need another bath. She pursed her lips and tried not to inhale alien debris. 

Being an Avenger was nothing if not glamorous, she mused without humor.

The raccoon dropped to the ground nearby with barely a sound and said, “Hey, you guys ain’t half bad at this. Usually it takes a lot more arguing to get people to do what I ask.” 

“You’re welcome,” the blonde replied flatly.

“I mean it. Primates. It’s a thing. Even if you’re used to people what don’t look like you, you know, skin wise? Even if it’s blue, green, red, you don’t tend to balk at the idea that they’re your equal. It’s rare I get treated like I’m smarter than any of you. And trust me, I’ve met some Terrans. I am smarter than some of you.” He tugged at his jumpsuit and rested the firearm on his shoulder. “You ain’t met Quill, but trust me, that guy’s a certifiable moron somedays.”

Natasha wiped her face on her sleeve. “The Dora didn’t tell us that anyone was out here. Did they know that you were in this part of the forest?”

Rocket shook his head. “Nah, I didn’t tell anyone after Thor and I split up near the barrier. Not used to asking permission to wipe my ass either.” A quick tug of the ear gave the impression that he wasn’t exactly comfortable. “Look, I’ve been a mercenary most of my existence. I steal things, I hunt bounties, I fight bad guys. I just usually have a partner for it. But we don’t answer to anyone.”

“Partner?” Steve asked.

“Yeah. Groot. Kind of looks like a tree? He was the muscle and we had an understanding. I did the talking, and he did the tough stuff. He was taller than you, bigger, more mature, but then he died protecting us from Ronan the Conqueror, right? Whole business with the Power Stone. I managed to kind of regrow Groot from one of his sticks. I mean, his personality was-” Rocket said, pointing to his head and making loops to indicate ‘crazy’ or perhaps twisted. Gestures didn’t always translate correctly. “Different, like he was starting over. But he was back, and we had him again and I took care of him. He died right over there.” He jerked his head in the direction he was looking. 

Natasha glanced at a large fallen log and said softly, “You came looking for hope that you might find enough of him to try and save him again.”

The snarl that rose unbidden in the raccoon was almost immediately tamped down by depression. “Yeah, well, my ship turned up heavy one Terran and the only other person on board told me that all the rest of my crew were dead one way or another,” Rocket explained. “It’s been a long time since I didn’t have the other Guardians, it’s been *longer* since I didn’t have Groot.”

Steve got a look of empathy on his face as the woodland creature looked like he was going to cry “I won’t say I completely understand,” he said. “I keep finding myself trying to turn and ask Sam something, and I know logically that he’s not there to answer. Bucky either. It’s like touching an open wound every time. I think everyone on the planet can empathize with you.”

The laugh he got in response was without humor. “Galaxy at least. I mean, yeah, your planet has billions of people, but you do get that there’s thousands, possibly millions of worlds out there, plus all the people who don’t live anywhere but their ships, right?” Rocket reasoned. “Trillions, more than that. Thanos has a lot to answer for.”

Natasha slowly digested that number. Even as a ballpark number, it was hard to swallow. “Yes, he does,” she agreed. 

“So, since I can’t kill him until we find the a-hole, his minions will just have to do until I’m reasonably done being pissed off about today.” The woodland creature looked over his shoulder, wiping any stray moisture from his eyes. 

“Thor was happy that you decided to stay,” Steve offered.

Rocket huffed a soft laugh. “Yeah, we met him in a bad spot. I mean, he was outside of a ship in the vacuum of space. If we hadn’t been there, he might have died. As it stands, he was pretty rough until he got that axe of his.” 

“He tends to do better with a weapon in hand,” Natasha explained. “He didn’t say what happened to Mjolnir.”

“He lost it when his sister tried to murder him, and he did okay without it when his planet got destroyed. Probably would have preferred to have it when Thanos murdered his people, though.” The raccoon scratched his neck absently. 

Steve and Natasha shared a look. 

“Thor’s a decent guy, you know, for an Asgardian. Absolutely insane, but he’s got good taste.” Rocket paused and then looked over his shoulder. “There’s another Outrider nearby.” 

Both humans followed his gaze and nodded. “Alright. What’s the plan?” Natasha asked.

“Well, since letting you two primates get hurt would probably make Thor a little perturbed, let’s try to minimize the danger in flushing them out. Make as much noise as you can, and we’ll try to corner them near the cliff over that way. Should make a decent kill-box.”

Yeah, mercenary. She could see that. “Let’s get moving, boys.”

* * *

Every inch of his chest hurt, as he blinked up at an unfamiliar ceiling. He was covered in blankets and soft clothing, but both arms were above the fabric. One hand was trapped by tubing, the other by something warm. Tony blinked and turned his head slightly, finding Rhodey nearby as proof that this wasn’t the worst nightmare of the billionaire’s life. He squeezed his friend’s hand and got the man’s attention.

“Hey, Tones. We’ve got to stop meeting like this, man,” Jim stated roughly, gesturing to their surroundings.

Tony squinted at the bright lights overhead and closed one eye. “Yeah, well, apocalypse survivors don’t get to be choosy, honey bear. What’s the damage?”

“They fixed the lacerations and used some kind of tech that will hold you together better than stitches and prayers, but I wouldn’t go doing cartwheels any time soon. The bruises weren’t a priority, but then again, most of us have them.” Rhodey rubbed his face, as if trying to get the sleep out of his eyes. “And if you would quit getting concussions, I’d sleep a little easier.”

He nodded. “No promises. Sitrep?”

“We are fucked, man. Like, royally screwed. All the Avengers who we know for a fact are alive are here. No contact with Barton or Lang yet. Hell, I don’t even know what the Princess wanted to talk to you about, but Shuri’s pretty anxious about it. She’s a sweet kid.”

Wakanda. Right. He’d landed in Wakanda with Nebula after getting back from Titan. Memories started filtering back in, and it was only by changing the subject that he had a chance of stopping the worst in its tracks. “Shuri. What about T’Challa?”

“Gone. They’re calling it Zero-hour, like a zero-point singularity. Before and after. We lost a lot of good people, man. Wilson, Maximoff, T’Challa, Vision.” He paused and said, “I know Thor probably told you, but it doesn’t make things a lot easier to deal with.”

No, it didn’t. He made as if to push himself up from the bed, ignoring the way his head swam. “Okay, let’s not keep royalty waiting.”

A hand on his shoulder stopped Tony from moving any further. 

“She’s probably about as smart as you were at that age, so maybe try not to treat her like a child,” Rhodes warned. “I can stall her for a little bit until you’ve had a chance to pull it together. You’re going to have to. Cap’s here, by the way.”

“A: knew where he was as soon as I got back from Siberia, and B: of course he is.” Tony rolled his eyes until his head ached. “Because that is literally how my luck is running these days. Last person I want to see becomes the first person I have to deal with.”

The serious look on Rhodey’s face was matched by the tone he continued in. “Yeah, I’m not going to let him continue the argument, but the same goes for you, Tony. Time and a place.”

“Yeah, well, next time one of us finds out our parents were murdered and our ‘friend’ lied about it for years, I’ll let you throw the first punch.”

The flippant answer was ironic, because honestly, it had been Rhodey who’d helped him pull it together in the first place. He’d seen the fallout of the Winter Soldier’s work, and he knew how very badly Tony tended to take betrayal. Give Rhodey long enough, and he’d try to take on the world on Tony’s behalf again. 

Of course, Jim’s mom was still alive, so there was nothing he could say to that particular point. At least he still had family. Mentally, he amended that. Maybe Jim’s mom had made it through alright.

“We can’t find Fury or Hill. Thor just briefed the UN because he’s the only person who sounds moderately inspiring at this point and I think he understood I’d rather be here with you. They’d probably love to hear from you rather than anyone else, though.”

“The UN loves you.”

Rhodey shrugged absently. “Did, past tense. I may have told Secretary Ross to go screw himself when Rogers reached the Compound, Vision in tow. I don’t think I’m anyone’s favorite Avenger at the present time.”

Were they out of options or what? The fact that Tony was even remotely anyone’s first choice was very laughable. He shook his head and then pushed himself up from the bed, ignoring the way the world swam with the movement. 

Jim’s hands ended up on Tony’s shoulders. “Tony, you are not getting out of this bed. You were dying less than five hours ago.”

A scoff of dismissal rose unbidden. “Don’t make me get metaphysical on you, Rhodey. We don’t have a whole lot of time before tracking that purple people eater becomes more problematic than I can fix.” 

Jim rolled his eyes and then said, “An hour is not going to make a difference, Tony.”

“A split second just made a hell of a difference,” he replied flatly.

Rhodey winced. He had to. Some days, the truth was just a bitch. Even so, he soldiered on. “I just told you, Cap’s here. Romanov. Possibly Barton and Lang if we can find them and get them to Wakanda. You really ready to deal with them, a Wakandan princess and the UN Security Council before you’ve even put clothes on?”

“Let’s face it. It would not be the first time I’d dealt with world-changing events without pants, Rhodey.” 

And there was the look of irritation he’d expected from the statement. “You know what, man, I’m going to go ask Bruce to let the Hulk sit on your annoying ass until I find some clothes in your size that you aren’t going to bitch about.”

Yeah, when Rhodey was bitching at him, the world was on the correct axis. 

“Quit smiling, you lunatic. You keep taking these daredevil risks because it’s like you think no one else can, when really, it’s no one else’s sense of self-preservation is so damned absent!” Jim shouted. 

“Okay, one? Until Bruce works things out with Big Green, we don’t have a Hulk to threaten me with, because I’m assuming he’s still having performance issues,” he replied calmly. Damn Rhodey for making him try to be the voice of reason and sanity. “And two: Rhodey, if I hadn’t been there, we wouldn’t have almost gotten that gauntlet off of Thanos’ hand. We had him on the ropes, we honestly did.”

“What?” he asked in horror.

“Yeah. Peter and Strange and this really weird alien lady and this blue guy and me, we had him. We had him, and… then we didn’t. Talk about a comedy of errors, Jim; we could have stopped this, if we had only had five more seconds.” He sighed and said, “And now, they’re all dead, and I was all alone on the worst place in the universe with an alien assassin I’d never met before, a handful of ash that used to be Spider-Man, a stab wound I’m going to have to return the favor on and all the what-ifs in the galaxy. So, you know, there’s that.” He tried to ground himself on the texture of the blanket under his fingers to keep from descending into another panic attack-slash-fugue like he had on the Milano.

With all the patience of the saint he was, Jim tried to console him. His voice was soft and calm, more like it had been that December and not post-Afghanistan. “Tony, this is not your fault.”

Tony looked away, finding a verdant scene outside the window by his feet. The blue sky was a welcome relief from the disaster he’d seen prior and puffy white clouds drifted lazily overhead as though it was a perfectly ordinary day. Far from it. “Six years, Rhodey. Six years, I have warned everyone who would listen that we weren’t alone, that we needed to be ready for what was coming, and it wasn’t enough. He came in and in less than a day, Thanos handed us our asses.” He snorted and looked away. “Six years, and every one of the Avengers except Thor treated me like I was paranoid, like Thanos was the boogeyman in my obscenely large walk-in closet.”

Rhodey had the good grace to wince. “I know that. But going in there and telling them ‘I was right’ is really going to make you look like an asshole, Tony.”

“You honestly think there isn’t a single person who’s going to be in any future meetings or planning sessions that thinks I’m *not* an asshole?”

“Her Majesty might give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Tony snorted. “Yeah. You might want to go ahead and make sure we can have five minutes to clear the air before we try to look professional in front of our new allies.”

“You think five is enough?”

“I think half the board of directors of Stark Industries are assholes. I can keep my mouth shut there, I can keep my mouth shut after the apocalypse.”

It went unspoken that Pepper usually still had to run some damage control or interference. The fact that Rhodey didn’t bring her up wasn’t encouraging. Maybe he just didn’t know. God, he hoped it wasn’t the alternative.

“Go find me some pants so that we can get this charade over with,” Tony answered, rubbing his face with his hands. “And find someone to take the IV out. You know how much I hate hospitals, Rhodey.”

“About as much as I hate having you in one, Tones. I’ll be right back.”

Tony took a fortifying breath and watched his best friend walk away, knowing he could have just as easily been the one who’d have died as a result of the failure to stop Thanos. Him, Pepper… anyone. No contact with Pepper meant either she was up to her ears in tragedy or even worse: she’d gone the same instant as Peter. 

Movement eventually jarred him out of the whirling vortex of his thoughts, and he said, “Rhodey, that was-”

A bald, severe looking Wakandan woman arched a delicate eyebrow at him, and Tony cut himself off. “Sorry. You’re not Rhodey.”

Her tone was dry and without amusement as she replied. “No.”

Jerking a thumb over his shoulder, Tony tried for a quick explanation. “He just went to get me pants.” 

“I am Okoye, head of the Dora Milaje,” she replied. “Her Majesty has been waiting for you to wake.”

That wasn’t ominous in the extreme. “Whatever it is, I swear I didn’t do it.” 

“No,” Okoye stated. “Not yet, but she is hoping that you will.” She handed him a bundle of cloth and settled in to wait. “You are shorter than our King; however, Her Majesty believes he will not mind the loan.”

He’d met the guy for about four hours two years ago, and barely spoken with him since. “I barely know King T’Challa, so I’ll have to take your collective word for it.” 

When she made absolutely no move to give him some privacy, well… it wasn’t like the world hadn’t seen his bare ass on the internet before. Tony shrugged and disconnected the IV with skill borne of practice. The gown type thing was easily discarded and Tony slowly tugged the long-sleeved shirt over his head, barely wincing as the movement pulled at the wound. It settled over the bandage with a little resistance, and he then shuffled into the warm-up pants, tying the drawstring high so he wouldn’t trip over the hems. 

With a kind hand to help him out of the bed, she guided him from the room. A few twisting corridors later, he ended up barefoot in a laboratory that was modern and sleek. It wasn’t quite like his workshop in New York, but it certainly had its charm. “Sexy,” he declared.

The Dora stiffened minutely in temporary offense. Right, don’t piss off the women who could drop you like a rock, Stark.

“I’m glad you approve,” a youthful woman’s voice offered, arms crossed over her chest. “It’s a pleasure to have you in my lab, Doctor Stark.”

“Pleasure to be here, Your… Majesty?” he guessed, and thankfully, it was a reasonable assumption.

She was slender and young. Very young. If he had to guess, late teens, but with the level of technology and the proprietary way she said ‘her’ lab, yeah. Rhodey was right. This was the kind of kid he knew how to deal with.

He’d **been** that kid. They’d both lost way too much way too young.

“Only in so much as I hold the throne in place of my brother,” she answered, rounding the nearest work-table. “I much prefer to be Princess, but circumstances are not in my favor.”

Tony sighed. “Yeah, I don’t think that circumstances are in anyone’s favor right now.”

“Did you know this was coming?” she asked with the candor of a child. 

He raked his hand through his hair before replying. “Bits and pieces. It’s hard to extrapolate with incomplete data, Your Majesty. Six years ago, in New York, we stopped an incursion by Thanos’ forces. I saw what was on the other side, I saw an army coming for us. In the end, it didn’t actually take an army for his preemptive strike to work.”

She nodded sadly and then informed him, “I wish that you had warned Wakanda.”

“No one believed me without proof, Your Majesty. The watchword of modern culture is proof, and I had nothing besides what I saw through that portal and a truckload of PTSD. I had no idea how to prove that we had two Infinity Stones on Earth to protect when the only one I knew about was the Mind Stone in Vision’s head or what they could be used for. I had no idea that danger was lurking in the shadows until they came for Doctor Strange.” 

“You are a voice of authority. You have charisma and conviction. There are those who would have listened,” she replied. 

He shrugged and pretended that it didn’t pull at the stitches or whatever they used to seal up the wound. “The unknowns in the equations have always outnumbered the known variables.” Tony trailed off before amending his statement. “I tried. But one man was never going to be enough against him.”

She rounded the worktable he was leaning on and stood just outside his personal space bubble. “One man is capable of tipping the balance, but he cannot shoulder the protection of the world alone. Do you know why the Black Panther isn’t my favorite superhero, Mister Stark?”

Tony blinked. “I don’t think I know you well enough to guess.”

“For one, he’s my brother. I have seen him be a complete and utter idiot enough to trust him, but perhaps not idolize him. It’s hard to hero-worship someone you’ve seen stumble headfirst into a toilet.” Her smile became a smirk. “You on the other hand. You have no enhanced strength, nor speed. You can’t shoot lasers from your eyes or magic reality like others can. You have what you have built, and you have used that for decades to change the world. To bring peace where there was war, hope where there was suffering, technology where it was thought impossible. You are a dreamer, Iron Man. Your superpower, Tony Stark, is here.” She tapped her temple. “They think. You calculate. That is a world of difference, perhaps even a universe.” 

That was a new answer. He blinked, as if trying to will his mind to catch up and find a reply, but like a denial of service attack, he was frozen.

“You inspire people to follow you and to do better. That is why you are my hero, Doctor Stark.” She moved closer. “I wish it had not taken the end of the world for you to come to Wakanda.” 

Finally, he managed to grasp at the right straws. “All you had to do was send me a schematic and I would have walked here on hot coals through lion infested jungles. I mean, when this is over, can I move in? This place is fantastic, and I could spend weeks just examining the tech I’ve seen so far.” 

Shuri grinned. “I’d like that.” She paused and then said, “You are not planning to take this catastrophe lying down.”

“Never taken anything laying down a day in my life. I’m not planning to start now, Your Majesty.” Even when it seemed like he was going along to get along, he was always working an angle, a workaround that would give him an edge. It was why he’d gone along with the Accords even when at their worst, because he had the ability to work the system.

There was always a plan, even if nobody liked it.

Shuri didn’t argue the point. Her chin lifted a little higher. Yeah, this was a royal kid and it was almost like looking in a mirror. This wasn’t a spoiled princess, this was someone who was smart, who was confident, and who knew how to get things done. “Are you going to get my brother back?” she asked firmly.

“Someone’s got to save him. Isn’t that usually your job?” Tony replied flippantly. 

“Always,” she answered, her smile somewhat sad. 

“Yeah. Getting them all back is in the plan.”

She nodded. “Then you have the full support of the Regent of Wakanda and all the resources our kingdom possesses. What do you need, Mr. Stark?”

“First of all, call me Tony. Second, what I need now is information. I need connectivity, which may mean getting back to New York. I need my AI, I need a new suit, I could pretty much go on.”

Shuri nodded to one of the other Dora who came forward with a box. “Allow this to fulfill the first of your needs.”

Tony opened it, revealing a thick bracelet of chunky beads, identical to the ones all the women in the room wore. They were magnetic, not strung on any thread, and adjusted immediately to the circumference of his palm. He pushed them slowly over his thumb until they settled at his pulse point and then ran a finger over the beads, feeling for etching.

With the merest hesitation, he pushed one out of alignment and it settled in his palm, projecting a hologram of the Google homepage over his hand. 

The princess’ smirk gained full strength. 

“I take it back. This isn’t sexy. This is phenomenally, breathtakingly supermodel levels of sexy.”

Her smile was genuine, and Shuri gestured to the bracelet. “I hear you make the best artificial intelligences in the world. I should like to meet this Friday.”

He pushed the bead back, checking each one’s function before settling on one that would allow him to put in a code into a seemingly random web portal. When the keyboard appeared, the seventy-two-digit hexadecimal code went in, and he waited for it to hash. 

The response was soft and hesitant but it was like a knot relaxed in his chest.

“Boss? I don’t recognize this interface,” Friday stated. 

“It’s me, baby girl. Friday, say hello to the Princess of Wakanda and the Dora Milaje,” he said, as she finally inched out of her metaphorical shell, revealing her brilliant orange-red matrix in the holographic projection in his palm. He flicked two fingers apart, willing the projection to increase in size so that she became more easily visible. 

She had never looked quite like Jarvis, but then again, she was younger, she was not as sophisticated. But she’d get there someday, if she had the chance. “Princess Shuri, ladies, it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.” 

Both guards looked at each other before Shuri said, “Likewise, Friday. You are truly exquisite.” She approached, carefully tilting her head to see the rotating bits of code. Every angle brought a different beatific smile on the teenager’s face and she calmly examined another line. 

“Thank you, Princess,” the AI replied, sounding a bit stunned. Few people looked beyond what she could do to see what she was, and that made Tony smile a bit. 

Clearing his throat, Tony forged on. “Friday, what’s the status of Inferno and Handbasket?”

“Miss Potts is currently in the New York office, running damage control. Stark Industries is operational, but in crisis mode,” Friday reported. “Handbasket protocol is at forty-two percent.”

“Understood. Pass Pepper a note, make sure she knows I’m okay.” 

“Recording audio-visual message now,” Friday offered. 

“Hey, Pep,” he began. “End of the world again, huh? I’m mostly okay, I’m in Wakanda with the others. Space still sucks. Brass tacks: I’m going to need about a petaflop of computing power via remote access, a list of SI resources that didn’t go down, and status on the list of critical people saved on the solid-state drive in my workshop. I know you’re busy, but there isn’t a person in the world I trust more than you. So. Take a deep breath, one foot in front of the other and we’ll get through this.” He stopped and let his face get more serious. “I love you, Pepper. I love you so much, and I’m glad you’re alive. We’re going to fix this. I promise.”

A cute envelope appeared in his palm and folded itself shut, disappearing into Friday’s matrix. “Sending now, boss.” 

“Friday, I’m going to need another Bleeding Edge suit, but open up a new design. It wasn’t enough to put much of a dent in Thanos and I took a pretty bad hit.” Tony paused for a moment before turning to Shuri. “It’s going to take a coordinated, complete strike in order to try and fix this, Princess. We’re going to need weapons because nothing we had was enough to take this guy out, and probably the only thing we have that made a dent in him was from out of this world, literally.” 

The princess nodded and moved to open up a holographic interface. “In Wakanda, we do the improbable daily. The impossible only takes a little while longer. Come. Let us begin.”


	4. The Dust Has Blinded Me…

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team huddles, and Mom and Dad actually talk for the first time since the divorce. 
> 
> Long chapter, but there was no good way to break it up. I've given up short chapters for the nonce. Sorry-not-sorry.

* * *

“I’m not saying you don’t need to be there because we’re going to be talking about you. I’m saying we’ve got some air to clear.” Tony stopped walking through the airy corridor, looked Nebula straight in the eyes and said, “I’m saying that the last time I saw one of the people in there, he tried to kill me.”

“Thanos raised me,” the blue woman replied curtly. “If you honestly think that familial dysfunction will shock me, you have vastly mischaracterized the relationship I had with my sister.”

Holding in the urge to laugh hysterically, Tony corrected their assumptions. “We’re not a family. We’re the worst team ever constructed. We barely hold it together long enough to agree on pizza toppings, let alone tactics for apocalyptic scenarios. The difference is, so far, we’ve managed to eke out a miracle every time. We stopped Loki in New York, we stopped Ultron in Sokovia. Now we’ve just got to figure out how to save the universe without trusting one another as far as we can throw them.”

At the combined look of disbelief from the raccoon and cyborg assassin, he continued. “I’m saying that we’re going to act on our best company behavior, even though the both of us are going to probably try desperately not to strangle each other.”

She blinked at him and her expression didn’t change an iota. 

It was rather like talking to a brick wall, so Tony inwardly shrugged. “Right, fine, suit yourself.”

Rocket tilted his head to the side as he waited for them to start moving again. “What do you have on this guy anyway?”

“He used my money and resources to track down his best friend, who just happened to be the man who murdered my parents in cold blood. And when I confronted him, he admitted to lying about it for three years and he and said friend beat the shit out of me, leaving me in a frozen wasteland.” Tony tried for irreverent, but to be honest, the summary still baffled him. He’d dealt with people his entire life: people who’d wanted his money, people who’d wanted his name, people who’d found a shinier toy somewhere else. 

Rhodey, Pepper and Happy had been the only people he could count on for the whole of their shared existence. They were trustworthy, kind, and put him first, and he didn’t know quite how to handle that ninety percent of the time. The other ten percent of the time, they dropped everything when he needed them most; they were the surrogate family he’d never had from his own blood. 

Objectively, he knew there was shared blame in the separation, in the fallout from Leipzig, but Cap had never trusted him since Ultron, and the hypocrisy of being angry at Tony for keeping secrets from the team was one he couldn’t escape.

They’d each chosen their own lonely paths and that had led them here. If he thought it was possible to avoid it forever, he’d be on his way back to New York to take on Thanos by himself.

The raccoon waved his hands in a warding-off gesture. “Wait, wait, wait. He stabbed you in the back and you haven’t killed him yet?”

“Don’t believe it didn’t cross my mind.” He sighed. “It’s a long story, and he’s really good at punching things. And inspiring speeches. And occasionally saving the world about once a year.”

“I would have killed him,” Nebula offered as she rounded the corner into the conference room of doom. 

“And this,” Rocket declared firmly. “Is why we don’t tend to take Nebula nice-type places. She used to try to kill Gamora on the regular. Might be the way she shows her love. Talk about your weird family customs. I’d keep an eye out for that, she seems kind of attached to you for some reason.” 

“Right,” Tony stated, rubbing at his chest absently. “That’s not terrifying.”

The raccoon squared himself in front of Tony and sighed. “Look, I dig the idea of not wanting to kill your friend even after he stabs you in the back. I mean, I pull shit over on Quill all the time. It’s kind of our thing. Kid was raised by Ravagers, got betrayed by the closest thing he had to a Dad more times than I think he cares to count. You think he’d be a bit better at dealing with a little backstabbing now. I don’t pretend to know thing one about this outlaw planet we’re standing on, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it really ain’t a new thing for you in particular, is it?”

Tony sighed heavily, feeling an incipient headache looming on the horizon. He really needed to get some sleep. “Not really, no.”

“Which is why the guy hasn’t met with grave misfortune. I mean, the way you swore vengeance on Thanos? It gave me chills. I liked it,” Rocket informed him. “This guy, you didn’t swear anything on, from the sounds of it. Because you were friends, you were close.”

“It’s complicated,” Tony protested.

“It’s **family.** And that’s a whole ‘nother level of screwed-up-sideways emotional tangle. Sometimes, all you can do is just call them an asshole, punch them and carry on. I would be the last person to tell you to forgive him, because me, I don’t forgive anyone anything without a damn good reason, and I don’t forget it even if I do unless it’s Groot. I’m just saying maybe you should let your head do the dealing with this guy because the heart is a fickle bitch and you can’t trust it when it comes to some people. And, you know, carry a **really** big gun.”

A raccoon was giving him advice about people. This had to be an insane hallucination. “I’m… still on drugs, aren’t I?”

“Yeah. Maybe let me hold the gun for now,” Rocket hedged. “C’mon, we don’t want to leave her alone that long. No telling what that sociopath will do unsupervised.”

Sitting at the long ebony-topped conference room table already were what remained of the Avengers. Three chairs remained, all in a row, with Thor at one head. Rhodey sat at the other, and the others were on the far side, Steve right in the middle. 

Rocket strode in like he owned the room and hopped up in the middle seat, daring Tony to say anything. The assassin sat next to Rhodes, facing Natasha fearlessly and that just left the spot next to Thor, who offered him a warrior’s handshake. 

Bruce smiled somewhat tightly as Tony paused behind the chair. “Interesting friend you’ve got, Tony.”

“All of my friends are interesting, Brucey-bear. It’s just most of my friends keep their metaphorical rage monster on the inside. Meanwhile, Nebula has long passed the event horizon of ‘give a crap what others think of her.’ It’s oddly liberating to be around someone who doesn’t hold anything back,” Tony answered. He then turned to Rocket. “Tact seems to be an Earth-based concept which may or may not exist outside of our heliopause.” 

Rocket looked around and then said, “Because yeah, this sucks. Congratulations, primates, we broke the fucking universe.”

“We didn’t break it,” Bruce protested.

“We just failed to save it,” Natasha answered. And when did she become blonde, because that just… yeah. Yikes. So weird. It was like he’d woken up in an alternate reality or come back to the wrong planet Earth.

Still not the weirdest thing to happen that day. 

“Yeah, well, so did everyone else,” Rhodey pointed out optimistically. “Let’s be fair here, no one in this room saw this coming like Tony did.”

Rhodey hadn’t wanted him to bring it up, so he had taken the bullet for him. Nice. He still glared at his only true friend in the room as he poured himself a cup of black coffee. “No one ever sees anything coming like I do, Rhodey.” 

“Like you do,” Natasha echoed flatly, two years’ worth of resentment in her voice.

In the same sarcastic tone that he knew grated on the spy like nails on a chalkboard, Tony explained, “Like six years’ worth of night terrors, a horrific prophetic vision of the future which more or less came true, and knowing for a fact that this asshole knew exactly where to find us for the last six years, three months, two days, seven hours...” At that, he took a healthy gulp of the coffee and took the only empty seat left at the table, between Thor and Rocket.

Steve opened his mouth to say ‘language’ and Tony glared him into submission. 

“Prophetic vision of the future?” Thor asked warily. He leaned forward until the chair creaked, resting both muscular forearms on the black tabletop. 

Thor wasn’t a bad guy to ask that question. It made it sound more believable. 

He looked in the cup, finding an inky blackness like the depths of space. “Yeah. Me, last survivor on a dead planetoid, surrounded by the dead bodies of Avengers who are blaming me for not having done more and oh, yes, Thanos’ fleet headed straight for Earth. Barring a few details, pretty damned accurate, considering Maximoff didn’t know anything about Thanos at that point.”

Bruce put both hands on his head and groaned, “That’s what you saw in Sokovia when you got the scepter. That’s why the shield around the world.”

“Yep." He popped the 'p' just to be annoying and then continued his monologue. "So if the next words out of anyone’s mouth are about me not having done enough to prevent this, we’re going to go a few rounds, because I did everything short of cross-stitching this shit on a pillow to try to make sure you people got the message, and instead, you were so wrapped up in the details that you took your eyes off the prize here. This day was always coming, and I knew that. I knew it would come and we wouldn’t be ready.” He saluted them with the cup, false cheer in his voice. “And we weren’t, and Thanos handed us our collective asses. Some metaphorically, some not.”

“Tony,” Rhodey warned.

“What’s cross-stitch?” Rocket cut in, distracting Tony from another tirade. 

A quick flick of the fingers on his Wakandan bracelet projected a hologram of the textile craft in question in his palm and Rocket shrugged. “Yeah, probably not necessary, then.”

“Are you going to be okay?” Steve asked. “You looked pretty bad.”

“I’ll live, which is more than half the universe can say for today.” Tony rubbed at his forehead wearily. “You know why he won? I mean, looking at it objectively. Everyone on his side of things was on the same damn side. We didn’t even know half the players on our side. I didn’t even know about Strange and he was on the same island as I was, with a fucking Infinity Stone.”

The twitch on Steve’s face was worth the glare he got from Jim and the hand signal ‘quit winding him up.’

Thor’s expression spoke volumes as to true contrition, like it was totally his fault that no one had known of Strange. “I learned of the Sorcerer Supreme’s existence on my last visit to Earth, but I didn’t have time to warn anyone. I apologize if this may-”

“Thor, you were stranded on Sakaar and then had to deal with the destruction of Asgard… twice. I don’t think Tony can blame you for not giving a full report,” Bruce argued calmly, holding up a hand to forestall any further argument. 

Tony took a deep breath before continuing. “It’s fine, Point Break. Not your fault.” He turned to Rocket and gave the raccoon one hell of an assessing look. “Didn’t know about your people, which - honest - would have been helpful before I ended up stuck on a dead planetoid with your crew, because Quill should have come with a warning label.” He shook his head. “You know, before he screwed up our nearly successful attempt to get the gauntlet off of Thanos’ hands which would have happened before he got the Time Stone from Strange.”

Rocket rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I’m going to go out on a limb and say he ain’t the best Terra had to offer the universe, because he’s kind of a moron. If he’s the best you people got, we’re fucked. The rest of you seem marginally competent, so I think I’m in good shape. But Quill was my moron, so… I’m going to be the one to bite his kneecaps off if we get him back in one piece.”

“After I kick him in the balls in my suit, please.” 

The woodland mammal had to think about it for a second before he said, “Quill is a dick. I’ll allow it. Best for everyone in the universe if he doesn’t spawn.”

“Wait, you nearly had possession of the deadliest weapon in the galaxy?” Natasha interrupted pointedly. 

“Before Thanos ended up with the Time Stone, Stark nearly had the gauntlet,” Nebula offered, not actually pointing out the fact that she was at least a little responsible for dooming that particular attempt. 

Tony rolled on anyway, cupping the warm mug in his hands and looking around for answers. “And sidebar: where the hell did that thing come from, anyway? Because I’ll be honest, it’s not like anything I had countermeasures for.”

Thor drummed one hand on the table, considering his answer thoroughly. “It was forged in the fires of Nidavellir by the same craftsman who created Mjolnir and Stormbreaker. His name is Eitri. He did not give Thanos the gauntlet by choice. Thanos slaughtered his people as he did mine.”

Tony eyed the axe at Thor’s side and then said, “Same metal?” He barely refrained from poking the mystical weapon within arm’s reach.

The demigod frowned minutely and then said, “Stormbreaker was forged from the same metal as Mjolnir, but as for the gauntlet, I don’t know for certain if any component could have been made of Uru.”

“I should hope not. Because out of every single being in the entire galaxy how in the universe could Thanos be worthy?” Steve asked, scrubbing his face with his hands. “That would put a whole different angle on this and it’s not one that I like to consider.”

The billionaire adopted a wry tone. “Thanos tore through my suit like it was made of tin-foil but I’m not entirely certain that was the gauntlet by itself. He already had four of the stones before he made it to Titan. Power, Reality, Soul and Space.” 

“Those damned Gems,” Rocket muttered. “Knew they were trouble when Ronan tried for the Power Stone back on Xandar.”

“When was this?” Rhodey asked.

“You and I ain’t running on the same calendar. Couple years, give or take.” He sighed. “We gave the stone to the head of Xandar’s military after we took Ronan out of the picture permanent-like. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say it went even worse for Xandar than it did for Terra.”

“It did,” Nebula confirmed. “It burned to cinder.”

“How many people lived on Xandar?” Bruce asked, his voice soft and hesitant like he really didn’t want to know the full answer.

“Billions,” the raccoon replied. “Probably more people than you had here.”

Silence reigned for a second before Rocket ventured onward. “So it weren’t just you. It was the entire universe who wasn’t ready for this guy. He’d never moved on this scale before, just one planet, and then he’d stop. He was building his armies, but he wasn’t full-on destroying everyone. It’s like trying to understand the boogeyman in the shadows and then he came out and nuked you in the face.”

“Yeah, it feels like we took a bomb to the face,” Steve conceded. 

“We had no defenses against him,” Bruce conceded. “We barely held our own against his army and a lot of Wakandans died.”

Tony had seen a video feed of the devastated people of New York while in Shuri’s lab. Wakanda wasn’t even remotely the end of the problem. “Back when I actually thought I could get a straight answer out of Fury, he said, that the Avengers existed to fight the battles SHIELD couldn’t. Every time we take the field, the consequences have gotten even more dire. The stakes got higher and we were wholly unprepared for the outcome this time around. This isn’t just a global catastrophe, campers, this is universal. You’re thinking of the millions of Wakandans who died? How about the roughly four billion on the planet Earth who are gone? How about the trillions, the quadrillions on other planets around this galaxy?”

Everyone in the room started to look vaguely green at that except Bruce. That was not comforting at all. Then again, when Hulk had failed to show in New York, that wasn’t good either.

Tony rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “That’s the stakes. Unimaginable loss, death on a scale the human mind can’t even calculate. We can’t let that happen even if we already did.”

“We need to find Thanos. We need to know where he is, what kind of resources he has left. Allies?” Steve asked, eyes focused on the aliens.

Nebula flexed her prosthetic left hand and let her eyes dart around the room nervously before answering. “I don’t know where he is, but I know his allies. The Black Order are very dangerous… and they are not to be discounted.” She narrowed her eyes. “There are four of them. One female, three male.”

“Out of curiosity, did one of them have freaky mystical powers, psychotic servant of darkness complex complete with full on delusions of Thanos’ grandeur and really creepy lips?” Tony asked, lifting his mug to down the last of his coffee while he waited for an answer.

“Ebony Maw,” she confirmed. “You have met him?”

“We didn’t exchange pleasantries. Can he survive hard vacuum?” 

She tilted her head and smiled cruelly. “Not to my knowledge, but he was the most dangerous of the four.”

“Oh, good. So he **might** be out of the picture. Yeah, Pete and I shot the guy out into space while saving Strange. We didn’t exactly pull over to make sure he bought the farm, though, so that’s still a possibility.” He tilted his head. “There was another one in New York. Big, strapping kind of guy, about as bright as a brown dwarf?”

“Cull Obsidian,” she replied. 

“Yeah, I think I took that guy out. If he was the second guy in New York, the one who kept trying to kill us in the park? I killed him. Or the Hulkbuster suit did, anyway,” Bruce offered. “Clamped an exploding gauntlet around his arm.”

“Wanda, Okoye and I killed the female,” Natasha answered. “Big spear?”

“Proxima Midnight. If you still have her spear, that’s a very useful weapon, even against Thanos,” Nebula suggested. “That just leaves Corvus Glaive.”

“If he’s one of the ones we faced in Scotland, then Vision killed him,” Steve answered. “Stabbed him through the back.”

Tony used the bracelet again to call up a video feed of Vision and Scarlet Witch fighting in Edinburgh, enlarging the bad guys. Ignoring for the moment that everyone in that video was now dead, he kept going. He turned to Nebula. “That him?”

“Yes.”

He nodded curtly, adding that information to the collated list in his head. “Assuming that dead actually means something to people from other planets, we’re potentially in the clear from his henchmen, assuming Lip Guy didn’t magic himself out of the jam.” He turned to Nebula again. “What about the Chitauri?”

“What you didn’t slaughter with your fission device six years ago, are possibly held in reserve. From the corpses I saw on the field, the Black Order brought Outriders. Same genetic precursor, but different evolutionary paths. They are mindless zealots for his cause and he uses them as cannon fodder. I would have to examine the wreckage further to be certain, but most should have been killed in the initial assault on this location.”

Rocket smirked. “We cleaned up a couple dozen in the forest earlier. They’re easy enough to mop up when they’re alone. The Wakandans are working on it as we speak.”

Solemn faces greeted Tony’s gaze as he surveyed their assets. 

“The way I see it,” Tony said, calmly. “We have two options. We can accept the fact that Thanos has obliterated, what, four planets worth of people and destroyed countless lives while still possessing the absolute and ultimate bling of unlimited power or-”

“I’m for ‘or’,” Rocket commented, holding up his hand like he was in kindergarten.

“Or, we retaliate,” Steve concluded. “Risk further death and destruction on a universal scale and possibly end up pissing him off and dying in the process.”

Wow, Rogers finally grew up and became a realist, and all it took was being an international fugitive for two years. Two warring ideas fought in his head: about time, and damn wrong. The most idealistic son of a bitch Tony had ever been infuriated by and he'd given up in the interval. Captain America wasn’t supposed to be a pessimist. He was supposed to be the ideal of all that was right and good, and honestly, that had been what Howard had tried to force down Tony’s throat his entire life. 

Great. How much did it suck that he’d managed to break Steve Rogers? Jim started glaring again. 

“If we go for a surgical counter-strike, we could get the Infinity Gauntlet and figure out how to undo this, Rogers,” he offered. “We all lost someone today, and I don’t think I’m the only one who feels like it’s time to move the universe to get them back.”

The gaze that met his was both hesitant and resolute. The man had burned the entire world in order to save Barnes, and now he’d probably do the same to get him back. Good to know some things about Rogers didn’t change even if they were the infuriating parts that had landed them in a big mess to begin with.

“You’re talking about a miracle,” Natasha murmured. Her elbows rested on the table so that she could put her face in her hands.

The laugh that escaped Tony was mirthless. “Maybe. Maybe I’m talking about the biggest Hail Mary in the history of Hail Marys. Thanos can’t hide from the entire universe forever and he just got a taste of ultimate power. I don’t think he’s going to sit on that for very long.” 

Bruce shook his head. “I’m not a betting man, but yeah, I wouldn’t lay odds on megalomania being a temporary personality trait where Thanos is concerned.”

“Trust me,” Nebula replied dryly. “It’s not temporary. He’s a psychopath.”

Rocket shot her a glance and made an odd facial expression like he was trying not to say anything about pots and kettles or whatever his equivalent was.

Tony flicked another glance at Thanos’ daughter. “I don't think that we are the only people in the universe who are going to want to take Thanos down, so we absolutely have to be the first people ready to go.”

The raccoon chuckled mirthlessly. “Yeah, once they figure out who’s responsible, the Sovereign will want blood if no one else does. They ain’t exactly the most reasonable folks in the galaxy.”

Nebula snorted. “You’d know,” she replied enigmatically, not explaining any further. There was backstory there, but they probably didn’t have time for it.

“So, we need to find him first,” Natasha stated. 

“Show of hands, who hasn’t stared the guy in the face?” Tony asked. “Because he knows my name and he probably knows it’s going to be pretty damned personal. If we try to ask around and he or anyone else is looking for us, we’re screwed.”

Natasha, Rhodey and Bruce held up their hands. “I mean, he’s seen the other guy, but Hulk hasn’t come out since New York,” Bruce explained.

“Might need your brain here, even if you have been in space for the past three years,” Tony conceded. 

“What did you have in mind, Stark?” Thor asked.

“We need something stronger than the weapons we’ve been using, and if that gauntlet is stronger than anything we have on Earth at this exact moment, then we need to go shopping.”

“Where, Walmart?” Natasha asked.

“Thor’s the only person who put a dent in the guy,” Rhodey pointed out. “Considering he got an axe from the heart of a dying star, I’d put that top of the list.”

“Yes,” he conceded. “Stormbreaker did a great deal of damage, though not enough to prevent the worst.”

“Meanwhile, I fought the guy for like five minutes, got one drop of blood out of him and he nearly killed me.” Tony shook his head. “That is not going to cut it.”

“Thanos doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who doesn’t finish the job,” Natasha offered, her tone indicating genuine confusion as to why he hadn’t shuffled Tony off the mortal coil. 

Nebula cast a glance at her, and then said, “Thanos clearly finishes the job, as long as it ensures he gets exactly what he wants. He wanted the Time Stone, killing Stark wouldn’t have accomplished that.”

Tony fell silent for a moment, circling back to the same question of why. Nebula was being cagey, she wasn’t bringing that up, but why? He caught her eye and lifted an eyebrow before turning back to the conversation at hand.

“Okay, now on to our assets. I’m assuming that everyone at this table is in for the endgame here. Because we all lost someone, some of us lost a lot of someones, but we’re still here, we’re still breathing, and until we run out of ideas, we’re going to keep trying to get them back, right?”

“Tis as I told the UN Secretary-General. We are here and we are united in this cause,” Thor replied. “They have offered to send other enhanced individuals in order to assist in our counterstrike against Thanos.”

“We get one shot at this, kids. We get one shot, because the instant Thanos sees us coming, he’s going to be able to twist reality and time and our heads,” Jim stated. “Which means we get all our priorities in order, all our ducks in a row, and we stand together, not near each other.”

Tony pushed his mug away and considered his hands in his lap before he spoke. “I spent the last six years or so, trying to come up with a way to stop Thanos from coming back and striking at Earth. I knew for a fact he was coming. I didn’t have all the data. I didn’t know about the Stones, I didn’t know about the Guardians, I didn’t know about the Black Order. We have to put all of this together, because separately, we didn’t get the job done. We tried to fight him with science, with magic, with superpowers and that failed, because he used that gauntlet to pick us apart.”

“So we find a way to combine all of it,” Rocket concluded. “Our technology, the sorcerers’ magic…”

“And we go all in. There’s no halfway, there’s no quarter. Just victory,” Natasha concluded.

“There’s a really good chance that we aren’t going to come out of this alive,” Steve finally conceded. 

“I never expected I’d come back from Titan in the first place,” Tony confessed. “It didn’t matter where we were, what we were doing. No matter where you were in this universe, everyone either won or lost the flip of a cosmic coin. We won. Or hell, maybe we lost. Because the people we lost in Zero-Hour, they’re not going to be able to take the fight to Thanos. We have to fight for them because they can’t do it anymore.”

Rocket clasped his hands together like he was praying and then said, “So, Thor and I are headed back to Nidavellir, aren’t we?”

“Yeah. We’re going to need something that’s going to put the hurt on Thanos, and what I can come up with is going to need to be stronger than what we have now. Nebula, you’ll go with them just in case they run into trouble.”

“Right,” the raccoon answered. “Well, it ain’t like we’ve got much to pack. You ready, big guy?”

Thor nodded sagely. “Aye, Friend Rocket.”

“We need to find Barton and Lang. This situation is all hands on deck,” Cap stated. “What about SHIELD?” 

Tony shook his head. “Friday can’t find Fury or Hill. Believe me, I checked. Twice. I think we have to face the possibility that they’ve tapped out of this fight.”

Steve nodded sagely. “We’ve been trying to get in touch with Clint, but he isn’t answering his phone.”

Tony almost rolled his eyes and then started hacking in through the thermal satellites in geosync above North America. “Right. Barton homestead is….” 

He stopped dead as he saw one heat signature in the house. Adult-sized. Shit.

Natasha swore vehemently in Russian. So, either Laura or Clint had made it, and none of the kids. A family of five was now one. “Steve?” she asked, voice calmer than anyone else’s would have been under the circumstances.

“We’ll take a quinjet. Keep an eye on him and let us know if he moves,” Steve ordered. 

Tony set another command on that one and then turned to his erstwhile Science Bro. “Bruce, did Wong leave a way to get in touch?” he asked calmly.

“Yes, he did,” Banner replied, looking beyond nervous. “He said Kamar-Taj has wifi, so you should be able to find him that way as well.”

Well, it went without saying that if anyone was on this planet, Tony could find them. Finding Bruce for so long had only been impossible because of the fact that he wasn’t on Earth. Like it was a personal affront, he set Friday to tracking down Kamar-Taj and finding out if Wong survived. At this rate, he’d need to bump Friday’s computing capacity up or activate one of the other AIs dormant on his system. 

“So what kind of weapons did you have in mind, Tony?” Rhodes asked quietly.

“Something that hopefully won’t try to kill us when we try to use it. It’s… hard to use a weapon that can judge you. Thor, the guy who crafted Stormbreaker. Why’d you leave him there?”

The demigod bowed his head. “He is the last of his people and wished not to come with us. I could not begrudge him that request. But he is a skilled smith.”

“As much as I really hate leaving this planet because bad shit happens,” Tony admitted. “Maybe I need to come with you. I need to know what we’re going to have to work with.”

“I don’t know that that’s a good idea,” Natasha replied.

“Oh, really. Why not?”

“Besides the fact that you’ve just climbed out of a hospital bed before the doctors actually let you out?” she asked wryly. “You had a punctured lung, and if we’re that far from help and you have a complication, you’re dead.”

Artfully restraining the urge to bang his fists on the table, he snarled, “I’m **fine**.”

“You should stay here,” Nebula opined.

“Excuse me?” Tony demanded incredulously.

Her superior expression was more effective than anyone else’s in the room. “I thought you understood that I tend to endorse the least imbecilic course of action. You swore vengeance. It behooves you to stay alive long enough to get it.” 

Tony blinked for a moment, wondering precisely when he’d lost control of the situation.

“I could go,” Rhodey offered. “Tony, I could find out what kind of materials they have to work with.” He always was the kind of guy to offer a compromise. 

“You some kind of mechanical genius like this guy?” Rocket asked.

“We met when Tony was in college, studying the same classes. I might not have turned a weapons manufacturing company into the world leader in clean energy, but I’m not too shabby in mechanical engineering,” he answered calmly. 

The raccoon looked at Tony, who simply nodded, rubbing his temple. 

“Okay, I suppose you won’t be complete dead weight.”

“Are we going to have to trade this smith something for his help?” Steve asked, frowning minutely.

Thor sighed. “I do not know if material gain is sufficient motivation for him. Eitri’s people are dead and he was crippled by Thanos. I believe he has as much reason as I to undo the worst of Thanos’ tyranny to any extent than we can.” 

“Every time I think this guy can’t get possibly worse, he reaches a new low,” Rhodey blurted. He looked to Nebula and apologized.

“Why do you think I have wanted him dead for the vast majority of my life?” she growled. “He never creates, he only destroys. He takes something good and whole and breaks it. He destroys worlds, leaving behind death and horror. And he calls it strength.”

Steve looked at her with something akin to empathy. 

One thing about homicidal cyborg assassins from outer space; she didn’t seem like she’d take it well.

“He murdered my sister for the Soul Stone. He called her daughter, and he always loved her.” She snorted, one hand clenched tightly where it rested on top of the table. “His idea of love is very much different than others. Most days I am very thankful that I never had his affection.” 

Tony leaned against the back of the chair he’d taken. “So. If everyone has something they’re going to be doing but you and me, Bruce, we have a lot of heavy lifting to get on.”

Hesitantly, Banner looked at the others before asking, “What do we need to do?”

The billionaire poked the table with one index finger to make his point. “We need to figure out what the hell Strange was on about before he died, because he claimed he knew the only way to win, but he didn’t tell me before he drifted away on the wind.”

The false sense of relief in Banner’s voice was his usual response to doomsday scenarios and repressed hysteria. “Oh good, I thought it was going to be something insurmountable.”

He looked down at a blip on his bracelet, where Friday flashed a text. “Ever been to Kathmandu?”

“First time for everything,” Bruce admitted. 

“If it doesn’t make you want to Hulk out, you’ll love it. Right, so we’re off to Shangri-la or whatever Kamar-Taj is. Call me when you find Barton and Bug Guy.” 

“Ant Man.”

Like he didn’t know anything about the rogue Avengers, Tony winced. “Right. C’mon Bruce. Let’s go. Rocket, Nebula. Try not to let the squishy humans get killed.”

“You don’t ask a lot, do you?” the raccoon asked.

“Rhodey?”

“I’ll be more careful than you will,” the colonel replied wryly. “I’ll try to bring back some metal samples for you.”

Bruce rounded the table as the meeting broke up. “You sure you’re up to this? Collapsed lung and high-altitude sound like a bad mix.”

Irritation flared like the pain of being stabbed in the chest all over again. Tony clenched his jaw and narrowed his eyes at the physicist who swore he was not that kind of doctor. “If you try to bench me again, I’m going to kick your ass without the suit, capische?” Tony muttered _sotto voce._

The physicist nodded and knuckled under like the good wallflower he was. “Nepal it is.”

With a single backwards glance, Nebula headed out the door with Rocket, who made a hand sign like ‘I’m watching you’ in Steve’s direction. Tony got to his feet and fist-bumped Rhodey before his friend accompanied Thor and the other aliens out the open doorway.

Steve stood, even after Natasha departed to get things mobilized and try Clint's phone one last time. With a meaningful look, the Captain conveyed the need to talk in private, and Tony resigned himself to that particular fate, waving Bruce off to wait in the corridor. 

“That’s not much of a plan,” Steve conceded after the room had otherwise emptied.

“It’s a work-in-progress, but to be fair, it’s more of a plan than we’ve had in the past.”

“Stakes are higher,” Captain America stated. “You said it yourself.”

“Well, you know, someone in every room has to state the blatantly obvious. I just decided to lay down on that particular wire.”

Steve snorted and shook his head, letting that damnably long hair fall in his face. “Never going to let me live that down, are you?” he asked wryly, scrubbing at his beard with one hand.

“I’m supposed to be the asshole in the relationship,” Tony answered. “You’re the one not playing by the rules, Rogers.”

He looked insecure in the extreme, like there was any number of places he’d rather be but there. Still, he was dressed in his suit, while Tony got to borrow threads from a King. 

At least they were both uncomfortable.

Steve crossed his arms like he was trying to hug himself. “You never called. Bruce said you had the phone, but he was the one that called me.” 

“Oh, so we’re doing this now. Fine, then the answer is: I never needed you,” he answered defensively. “And besides, I had my family in tatters, my empty home with a hole in seventeen stories, and more important things to do than trying to salvage a relationship with a raging hypocrite who ignored and broke international law because it didn’t suit him.”

“It wasn’t that simple, Tony!” As if the man felt like he was actually a broken record, Steve resignedly replied, “It wasn’t Bucky’s fault. You can’t hold decades of brainwashing against him-”

“I’m not angry at the gun that killed my parents. I’m furious at Hydra. I’m angry at my father for never warning me about SHIELD. I’m angry at you, Steve. I can hold it against you when you criticize me for my secrets and let yours destroy what we had tried to build. Howard was your friend. How in the world could you let me believe that my father killed my mother in a drunken car crash for a second longer than you knew it was a lie? You should have been the first person to tell me, not the last.”

“If I had told you about Bucky, about what I knew and when, would it have made a difference?” the painfully young soldier asked him. “If I’d have told you after SHIELD fell that the world’s deadliest assassin was my best friend and that he’d murdered your parents, would you have trusted me long enough to try and bring him in peacefully?”

“I guess we’ll never know,” Tony replied in frustration. “Because that’s not the way it happened.”

“I know.” Regret stood between them like a third person in the room and for a moment, neither man looked at the other. 

“All of this, Cap, **all** of it was about not trusting people. D.C? You never called anyone. I could have helped, Barton probably would have showed up with bells on. That was his home for decades. That was a rookie move, Rogers,” the billionaire declared, making a sharp hand gesture as though presenting the truth in a slideshow.

“You were at risk too!”

“Steve, I am the creative mind behind the world’s leader in communications and energy and a former weapons manufacturer. I am a billionaire, I am Iron Man, and I've been kidnapped more times than I care to think about because I'm Tony Fucking Stark. I’m at risk if I walk down to the Starbucks off of Times Square for a Unicorn Frappucino. Not telling me about a fight that involved me was worse than making a damn phone call.” He shook his head dismissively and forged on. “I have historically had several very good reasons for not trusting people as far as I could throw them. I couldn’t trust them in the business world, in Afghanistan… I thought I could trust you, could trust Banner and Thor and Barton and Romanov. So I did. In the end, what the big problem was is that neither one of us trusted **me** to make the right call for the world when the chips were down.”

“That’s not true-” Steve began, finally deciding the argument was worth having after the quasi-self-pitying statement from Tony. “Tony, it wasn’t about not trusting you, it was about our hands being tied.” 

“If the safest hands are ‘our’ own, please, Steve, tell me who falls in that category. Because you didn’t trust me to know international law well enough to make a cogent decision on my own even though I've been living with it far longer than anyone else on the team. I still believe that Accords were a tiny step in the right direction, Cap. And for the record, screw you for making me be the voice of reason, Steve! I always will believe in the spirit behind the Accords if not their letter, because I have to believe that the opinion, safety and security of the people of nearly two-hundred countries means something. I trust me more now because I think the things I’ve done in the past three years have been about earning people’s goodwill and trust and protection. About showing them that someone does care, that we do listen. That the little guy matters.”

“And when the little guy is a brainwashed Soldier?” Steve asked sarcastically.

“Then we fight for him too!" Tony spat, feeling his blood pressure rising as the pressing need to set this idiot straight moved forward in his brain. "I negotiated my ass off to get that agreement from the Accords council in Germany. You didn’t believe that I had it in me to keep the only friend that really mattered to you safe. You **never** really believed in me, Rogers. In what I could build, what I could supply, what I could do, but never who I really was.”

Finally, frustration bled through into Rogers’ tone and his voice climbed a few decibels. “Because everything was a joke to you and I never knew when I could trust what you were saying was true or when you were glossing things over to make yourself look good. Appearance and SHIELD’s profile was all I had to go on. Because that was all you ever gave me, Tony!” The name echoed in the room for a moment, and he knew that it was heard in the hallway.

His response was soft, barely above a whisper. “You could have **asked.** Any one of you could have asked, but you didn’t. The last time we had a civil conversation that didn’t have to do with work was the night Ultron attacked the Tower. The last time before that was six months before. You never knew me and I never knew you. You could have asked Rhodey. My best friend is **nothing** if not honest and he’s known me for almost thirty years. He’s my friend, he’s not blind to my faults and he is quick to point out when I’m talking out of my ass.”

“Colonel Rhodes is blunt,” Steve agreed ruefully. “But he’s always been your best friend and he’s loyal to you. He has always been on your side.”

He hesitated a few seconds before saying the one thing that had been on his mind since Ross showed up at the Compound two years ago. “There should never been sides to begin with, Cap. That was a fight we should have been in together, not against one another.” 

Captain America looked at his boots and then said the first thing Tony had agreed with in three years. “Yeah. We should have been together.”

He shook his head, and said, “Look, at this point, I don’t know that the Accords or our phenomenal trust issues matter anymore. When we take the fight to Thanos, it can’t be here on Earth. Too much potential for collateral damage here, and there, the Accords won’t mean shit. What we have is the worst day in human history, and a pressing need to find common ground to fix it. Trust me, I can work with people who don’t like me. I’ve done it my entire life. That’s not a danger.”

Steve rounded the end of the table, coming closer than Tony really cared for given that his suit was in shambles in Shuri’s lab. Still, he wasn’t acting like a threat. “I don’t dislike you, Tony. It’s been pointed out by certain parties over the past two years that I never really knew you well enough to like or dislike you on your own merits. You weren’t what I expected and you didn’t fit into the spot I thought I’d carved out for you. That’s partly my fault. But I don’t dislike you.”

Captain America had given Tony plenty of reasons to dislike him, but as he’d said before, it didn’t matter now. Tony stared him right in the face and declared, “Even if we’d talked after Leipzig, even if we’d tried to come to some kind of arrangement, you know that it wouldn’t be the same. We can’t go back to a reset point before things went wrong. They went wrong from the beginning.”

“You’ve always been the biggest optimist,” Steve replied. Sarcasm had to be the default setting these days. He sighed heavily, straightening his shoulders before he tried again in earnest. “I can’t accept that everything went wrong from the very beginning. I think something had to go right, before things went wrong.”

That was debatable, but this wasn’t the time or the place to hash it out. It would have been so much easier if he could just hate the guy from the get-go, from the moment the soldier had gotten in his face. The others hated Tony enough, why he was unable to muster up the energy to reply in kind. Moving on, he gestured with one hand in a circle. “Steve, our part in the Infinity Stones’ story started in New York. It started with the Tesseract. It has to end now. No more sword of Damocles hanging over Earth, not anymore.”

“Yeah,” he answered, hesitating for a few moments before clarifying. “We either have to break the gauntlet, destroy the stones or somehow separate the gauntlet from Thanos before he can use it again.” Rogers paused, looking down at the conference room table. “Tony, do you ever get the feeling like this is our last shot, our last chance to get it right? We’re back where we started now. Just those of us who were in New York, assuming Clint is the Barton who survived. Full circle.”

“Then we damn well better get it right this time.” Tony took a fortifying breath. “We need to find a weapon, some kind of approach that will take Thanos down; we need to know how other universes won. I’m hoping Strange’s people will know something because he used the Stone in order to see alternate timelines, timelines where we won and to see how we defeated Thanos. They’re our best shot of information short of what Nebula can shake out of someone using some borderline questionable methods.” He shrugged and then said, “Speaking of the Accords, if Ross is still alive, you’re going to have to be quick in the US. He’s still out for your blood and given that just about every Avenger besides Thor and me are _persona non grata,_ you need to stay off his radar. I don’t want to have to break you out of the Raft before we take on the Titan. We don’t need that kind of distraction.” 

The blond nodded curtly as he shifted his weight like an errant schoolboy in the principal’s office. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I hurt one friend while trying to protect another, and I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you. I know it doesn’t mean a lot right now.”

“Nope.”

“But-” Steve protested.

“You and I both know that there’s a good shot that one or both of us aren’t coming out the other side of this war intact. That’s what war is. If one of us dies, what kind of difference is any kind of apology, any kind of forgiveness actually going to make? If you mean it, Steve. If you **really** mean it? Try again when Thanos is dead. It’s the only way we can both try to fix it or decide whether it’s better to just walk away again.” 

Resignation washed over Steve’s face and he nodded curtly. “Alright. We’ll play it your way, Tony.”

He flicked a glance at the door, finding Natasha waiting there. 

“Wow. All grown up and using your words,” she commented idly with both arms crossed over her chest. “It only took an apocalypse for the two of you to talk like adults again. Maybe we should have scheduled the end of the world sooner.”

“Cute. What is it, Anansi?”

Natasha’s mild irritation at the nickname peeked through her stony façade. “I have the Quinjet prepped. The Milano is already departing Earth orbit.”

“Thank you, Nat,” Steve offered. 

Probably not the most politic time to bring it up, but it had to be said. Tony took the bait. “Look, I know Barton’s a professional Agent, but do you honestly think he’s going to be in the right frame of mind to take on Thanos without getting us all killed?”

“Before he was an Agent,” Nat replied. “Long before SHIELD, he was a mercenary for hire, an assassin like me. Deadly, morally dubious. Coulson gave him a chance to be a hero and he took it. Fury gave him the chance to be a father, and Clint did his best. Thanos stole something infinitely precious from Clint; it is something he is going to get back or die trying. We might have to restrain him until it’s time to let slip the dogs of war, but he’ll be ready when we need him, Stark. You just figure out where to point him in the right direction.”

Captain America nodded. “We’re going to have to get moving. Be careful, Tony.”

“Likewise,” he acknowledged before departing and finding Bruce waiting pensively right outside. “C’mon, Banner. We have a ride to catch. Can’t keep Harry Potter waiting.”

"Please, for the love of God, lie to me and tell me you're not going to call a sorcerer that," Bruce lamented, trailing after.

Tony screwed up his face as he wrapped an arm around Bruce's shoulders. "Yeah, you're right. Wong strikes me as more of a Dumbledore."

"I keep trying to remember why I missed you. I'll work on it. We left the quinjet over here," Banner directed, gesturing to a hangar with an empty plane.

For the first time in about half an hour, Tony could breathe. Now he just had to find Hogwarts. It was a start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delay. Vacation was awesome, but I got back to no internet. *sigh*
> 
> Proof that there is actual plot coming up next chapter:
> 
> Tony and Bruce both looked up from the ancient tome and their eyes snapped to Wong in exact unison.
> 
> “Oh, thank god you’re faster than Stephen was. You men of science always take so long to see the solution; I really didn’t the patience to have to spoon-feed you today.” Wong sighed, waving a hand so that two chairs hit them in the back of the knees, forcing them to sit down *hard*. “I’ll get you something to write on.”
> 
>  
> 
> We find out why Strange insisted Tony had to survive, and we find out which Barton made it.
> 
> (Also, bonus points if you can tell me where this chapter title came from.)


	5. Always Darkest Before The Dawn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enlightenment of a sort can be found in Nepal. And arguments. And a lot of eyerolls.
> 
> Sorry for the delay. The POV fought me the whole way when the plot didn't. Also, yes, I'm aware Bruce is trying to talk to people in a non-native tongue, but he can't be fluent in everything. :)

* * *

The streets of Kathmandu were a lot like the markets in New Delhi, and both men made their way through the throng with little hindrance. Bruce had years of experience in moving through crowded streets and despite the anxiety that should have accompanied him, it was a return to familiar territory. Although the aftereffects of Zero-Hour were plain to see with some family members openly weeping as they clung to toys or scarves, much of life went on as it had to. 

The world didn’t stop turning for grief, or it would have ceased turning in some portions of the world long before today. There was still work to do, mouths to feed. Still, it felt more acute to Bruce’s mind. This was about the consequences of defeat. The Avengers had barely begun to pay the wages of their failure. Governments were destabilizing, families had crumbled, and the world was in chaos. 

That was what he knew for certain. The fallout was always worse - more painful and catastrophic - than the explosion. That was why they were here.

They’d barely stepped off the quinjet before a piece of paper had blown onto the ground near Bruce’s feet. He’d snagged it, finding an address listed upon it, and had not been stupid enough to ignore the numbers that matched with Tony’s internet research. He asked a few people directions in broken Hindi knowing that he didn’t have proficiency in the right languages and got responses back in broken English. Two streets up, one street right, and they’d come to a door with a strange symbol on it. Finally, he came to the otherwise nondescript door and knocked on it.

By the time Bruce’s hand would have landed the second time on a heavy wooden panel, the door disappeared and Bruce’s momentum carried him forward until he nearly landed on his face. Tony’s hand on the back of his jacket held him from falling. 

The entry-way was a dark and slightly dank looking foyer with very little natural light aside from the flickering of candle sconces on the wall. At the far end of the room stood two unfamiliar strangers in clothing similar to what he’d seen Wong wear in New York. Neither seemed immediately friendly.

“Hi, my name is Bruce Banner. This is Tony Stark; we’re looking for Wong,” Bruce greeted. 

The blond woman was the first to respond. Her hair was twisted into a tight bun and she held herself as if she expected a fight. Maybe they often did, or maybe it was an overabundance of caution given the events of the day. The stern visage she bore was eventually replaced by wariness. “Wong,” she echoed. “Wong is busy.”

“Everyone in the world is busy,” Tony blurted. “We don’t have a lot of time to fix this mess, so the sooner we speak to Wong, the sooner we’ll be out of everyone’s way and let you handle your crisis mode as best as you can.”

Kamar-Taj looked like a cross between a martial arts dojo from a Bruce Lee movie and a Buddhist temple. It was warm and clearly well-cared for, but neither sterile nor modern. While it was different from the house on Bleecker Street, it was close enough that he felt the same kind of thrum he’d felt upon destroying the stairwell. 

Bruce decided to step in, emboldened by his surroundings.“We met him in New York. He was in the Sanctum Sanctorum with Stephen Strange. Please, we do need to speak to Wong. It’s a matter of life and death; not ours, but the universe’s.”

The woman nodded slowly as if coming to a decision. “He is in the library.”

“Right. Could we speak with him?” Tony asked. 

A hand movement had them both staggering as they were surrounded by thick and seemingly dusty tomes. It was Tony’s turn to nearly faceplant, and Bruce steadied him before taking in their new environs. Dark wood lined the room as bookshelves crammed full of thousands of books reached floor to ceiling. A work table sat in the middle of the room, covered with loose-leaf pages with diagrams and writing. 

“That’s going to get real old, **real** quick,” Tony muttered under his breath as he regained his footing.

Behind the desk, the heavy-set Asian man they’d met in New York was shuffling papers, obviously looking for something amidst all the chaos. A pair of youths looked up from the door and with a wave of the elder sorcerer’s hand, made themselves scarce.

“Stark,” Wong stated, his brow furrowed in consternation. “Banner.”

“Very same. We’ve got big problems. I’d imagine you noticed,” Tony stated, rallying quickly from the disorientation.

“Over half of the Masters are dead,” the heavy-set Asian man confirmed as he rounded the mahogany table and crossed the room towards them. 

“So’s Strange. He traded the Time Stone for my life.” 

Wong blinked, failing to comprehend that statement for a moment. His steps stuttered to a stop as he began to think very quickly about the situation.

“Oh, good, not just me who doesn’t get it. Yeah, Strange told me he wouldn’t hesitate to let me or Peter die if it meant that he kept the Stone. Which is great, because like two hours later, he gave Thanos the thing because the guy agreed not to kill me.” Tony threw up his hands in semi-hysterical surprise and made a disgruntled face.

A quick movement of the guy’s hands formed two orange mandalas of eldritch light and Tony ducked his head out of the way. “What the-”

“It won’t harm you. I just want to see what Stephen did.” 

“I’ve got a real problem with magic people messing with my head,” Tony replied. 

“What, Strange did it?”

“No, but the person who did mess with my head didn’t exactly do it to be nice.”

“He may have left me a message.”

“So **ask**. Consent is classy,” Tony replied defensively.

As though Tony was making the most unreasonable request in the world, Wong rolled his eyes and then queried in a deadpan, “May I please have a look at your memories to see if Stephen left me a message embedded in your mind that may give us some idea of what the hell he thought he was doing?”

Bruce tilted his head meaningfully. “It would be quicker than telling the story one more time.”

“Fine.” Tony closed his eyes and said nothing further although he gestured towards himself as if declaring open season.

Wong lifted his hands again and closed his eyes, focusing intently on something beyond Bruce’s view. It was almost like watching two people have a shared seizure and neither one of them seemed to be enjoying the experience at all.

Sixty seconds passed before Tony gasped for air and grabbed onto Wong’s tunic with a white-knuckled grip. The magic was broken, and Wong rested both hands on Tony’s neck. 

“You put up a valiant fight,” Wong concluded.

“It wasn’t enough,” the genius breathed, trying to extricate his fingers from the sorcerer’s clothes.

“One man is never enough,” the Asian replied, gently. “That’s why there might be only one Sorcerer Supreme, but there is never just one sorcerer on Earth. It wasn’t your fault. Why are you making me state the obvious?”

“I’ve known he was coming for six years.”

“Six minutes, six years. It’s still not a lot of time to make a difference.”

Tony scoffed, shaking his head. “Six seconds can make all the difference in the galaxy if you’re trying to disarm a bomb.”

“Or send it into space,” Wong argued. “We knew about the Infinity Stones far longer than you did, but did nothing. Why aren’t you blaming us?”

“Because I’ve been told that blamestorming doesn’t solve anyone’s problems,” Tony replied. “And we have more than enough problems to deal with at the moment.”

“Neither does refilling the cup of your guilt every time you contemplate what has happened,” the sorcerer answered. “Set it aside and let’s figure out how Stephen intended us to fix this. Thanos is not done.”

“Okay, this is the point where you explain how you know that, because if that ginormous raisin got into my head at any point-”

Wong smirked. “He didn’t. Your name is known, Stark. Whispered throughout time and throughout the cosmos. You stopped a planetary invasion.”

“Yeah, **we** did,” he stated, pointing to both of them. “The Avengers, might have heard of them?”

His flippant answer was met with a headshake. “What Loki knew, Thanos knew. You faced him without fear. You met him as an equal and you defeated him and his army. He would not have forgotten you.”

“You also got touched by the Scepter and it didn’t do anything to you,” Bruce reminded him.

“The arc reactor was in the way. The Mind Stone never actually touched *me*.” 

Wong waited silently, as though epiphany was supposed to do the work for him. It didn’t. Finally, he continued. “He did not expect Stephen, and Stephen has faced conflict on an unimaginable scale. He fought Dormammu of the Dark Dimension to a stalemate and protected the Earth. His name is not known though he used the Time Stone to do so.”

Because of the people of the Earth, only one had solidly rebuffed the power of an Infinity Stone. Thanos would have known that. 

“Whatever the reason, Thanos knows of you. Of all the people of Earth, yours is one name he knows. There is no influence of his on your mind or I would have known it when I touched it, Stark. He knows of you because he fears you. I don’t know why Thanos decided to spare you, but I know why Strange made the bargain.”

“He fears me?” he asked derisively. “C’mon, if he doesn’t fear the Hulk, why in the hell would he fear me?”

“Everyone has fears, Stark. You just met yours in the flesh and you survived. Focus on that.” 

“He still beat us.” 

“Defeat is not a zero-sum equation, and there’s more than one kind of victory. There is always a cost, Mister Stark,” the sorcerer informed him. 

“Thanos killed one of his daughters. That still doesn’t exactly make up for what we lost. We definitely didn’t come out further ahead,” Bruce argued. 

“The question is how Strange saw us winning, because I don’t know. He didn’t tell us,” Tony complained. 

Silence fell in the otherwise peaceful library as all three men considered the problem.

“The Observer Effect?” Bruce offered. 

“What does that have to do with it?”

Bruce crossed one arm over his stomach, resting the elbow on his hand, as he often did when thinking. “The Observer Effect states that by observing a phenomenon, you influence the outcome. Like monitoring a circuit actually diminishes the current within it infinitesimally. Maybe Strange was afraid that by knowing **how** you beat Thanos, you wouldn’t because you’d miss something crucial in the planning and get yourself killed.”

“Okay, I’m not saying that’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard at the end of the universe, Bruce, but it’s getting close.”

Wong shook his head as Bruce rolled his eyes. 

Tony was under stress; they all were. It was a good thing Bruce was used to that sort of behavior because the Hulk didn’t do much more than rumble.

“I’m serious. We need to know, we didn’t need a day trip to Nepal to find these kind of answers, Bruce. I mean, it’s a nice temple you’ve got here, very Zen vibes, but I don’t know that it’s going to be much help if we can’t find out how we are supposed to win.”

Wong shook his head as though he was used to dealing with hysterical billionaire geniuses in the middle of his library. “Stephen knew you needed to come to Kamar-Taj. He knew that the answer you sought was not here but that the inspiration you needed to find it would be. That’s why he kept piquing your curiosity. I’m not saying you’re a simple man, Mister Stark, but I am saying that he knew your personality. Give you a puzzle you can’t solve and you will drive yourself to the end of the world to find a solution. Give you a reason to fight, and not even death would stop you.”

“The answer we seek is here. I’m very hopeful that’s not enlightenment in the spiritual sense because that might take a while,” Bruce opined. 

At Tony’s sharp look, Bruce amended, “For the both of us.”

“You’re correct. We don’t have that kind of time.” He gestured to the books. “Strange came to Kamar-Taj seeking a cure for a disability. His hands were destroyed in a car accident, he wanted to regain their function enough to return to his life.”

“But he didn’t find it?” Tony blurted.

“He found a higher calling than being a petty and vain neurosurgeon in New York. He was Sorcerer Supreme, he has saved this world more than you know. But in his search for a cure, there is not a book in this library that does not bear Stephen’s fingerprints. He knows everything in this library and where to find it.”

Tony glanced around the library in despair. “Great. Do you have a list of where we should start? I’m assuming Dewey Decimal doesn’t have a listing for Hogwarts.”

Bruce had to smack Tony for that one, which at least made the sorcerer smile.

Wong went to one of the books and grasped it, holding it out like it held the answers to the universe’s myriad secrets. 

When Tony made no move to take it, Bruce did, opening the cover and flipping through. At least it was in English. He stopped dead, however, at one of the few illustrations. It looked like a tree of some sort, but the branches were more entangled than a thicket of thorns, and each one split into others. 

Tony leaned over his shoulder, completely ignoring Bruce’s personal space bubble, and then said, “Is that the thicket of thorns outside the castle from Sleeping Beauty or is that supposed to be a representation of alternate universes?”

Wong’s smile was one of superiority and he said, “You honestly didn’t think there was only one dimension, did you?”

Tony stepped back and his expression went mildly vacant for a moment. Even Bruce’s mind went whirling with the various possibilities. What if, what if it didn’t… “You’re talking about alternate dimensions. Quantum theory. For every decision in the universe, there are multiple branches created from every reality. A reality where I never became the Hulk, where Tony never became Iron Man.”

Like the man was about to impart more of his universal wisdom, he held both hands out in front of him. But unlike the visual Strange had provided in Manhattan, Wong simply spoke. “At the instant Thanos gained the Infinity Stones and killed half the world-”

“Let’s be clear here, half the universe,” Tony corrected, waiting for Bruce to flip to the next page and poking him in the ribs when he didn’t do it quickly enough. He'd forgotten just how sharp Tony's fingers were.

“An almost infinite number of branches were split off from our reality. A reality where I died instead of Stephen, where Stephen died, but so did you, Bruce Banner. Those are the universes we need to know, because in one of them, Thanos was defeated and mankind prevailed. We don’t know which one, and we don’t know how.”

Tony raked his hands through his hair once again and then said, “This is metaphysics, not physics. We haven’t even **remotely** theorized enough about how the universe works in order to test a hypothesis on this, let alone come up with a reliable method of contacting other quantum realities off the cuff.”

Wong gathered two more tomes and set one on the table right in front of each man. One, a text of mathematic equations underpinning magic, the other on the Infinity Stones. 

Tony coughed minutely at the fine layer of dust that action stirred up, waving the remainder away. 

“The Time Stone was not the only Infinity Gem that the Sorcerers were aware of. There was another on Earth.” Wong waited for them to complete the identification, like it was some type of test.

“The Tesseract,” Tony supplied.

“The Space Stone,” Bruce concluded. “SHIELD had it for years.”

“Or rather, Dear Old Dad did,” the engineer replied, voice acrid. "Clearly he left it in great hands, given what happened with SHIELD."

The billionaire opened the book in front of him like the idea of a paper book offended him and flipped through it, skimming page after page and only stopping dead at a single equation.

“Tony? What is it?”

“This is the fundamental math underlying the arc reactor technology,” he stated softly. “Why is it in a hundred-year-old book in Shangri-La?”

“The arc reactor design, the initial design, was based off of your father’s initial experiments with the Tesseract, which turned out to be the Space Stone.”

Tony and Bruce both turned to look at Wong in exact unison.

“Oh, thank god you’re faster than Stephen was. You men of science always take so long to see the solution; I really didn’t the patience to have to spoon-feed you today.” Wong sighed, waving a hand so that two chairs hit them in the back of the knees, forcing them to sit down **hard**. “I’ll get you something to write with.”

As though the breath had been knocked out of him, Tony was silent for a few moments. Page turned after page, as pictures of the Tesseract and its fundamental nature were laid out on the slightly yellowed pages. He silently tapped his fingers against the book as if trying to puzzle something out. “So if it came about because of Howard’s research, what is the same? Is it the same frequency, the same wattage?” he murmured softly. “What the hell did I do in that hole in Afghanistan that made this insane gamble work?”

The sorcerers had to have studied both Stones intensely, trying to understand the relics they'd had in their possession, and although they'd never been able to replicate them, they knew the Space Stone's nature well enough to describe it mathematically. It had taken hundreds of years and a genius to come close to replicating it. It had taken a genius in a cave to miniaturize it.

“You made a synthetic Infinity Stone,” Bruce pointed out, somewhat stunned.

“Cap’s debrief after he was thawed said that Red Skull used the Tesseract and it tore a hole in space, and sucked the guy through it. We saw what Loki was able to do with it in New York,” the billionaire theorized.

“And you walked around with something at least theoretically similar lodged in your chest for the better part of a decade,” Bruce offered, only barely managing to keep the stupidity of that approach out of his tone.

“Yes, trying not to dwell on the fact that the closest thing the sorcerer is vaguely hinting that we have to a synthetic Infinity Stone powered a device that kept shrapnel from killing me. Because that's kind of like using a sun's full energy to power a blender.” Tony raked both hands through his hair, making it stand up even more wildly. “If Wong’s trying to tell us that the arc reactor technology is capable of bridging the gap between universes in the same way that the Space Stone can rip a hole in reality and let Thanos jump between planets, I’m not going to say Wong's crazy, but don’t you think I’d have noticed it in a decade of using said tech?”

“You’ve only used palladium and Starkium as cores for the reactor.”

“Well, yes, but Jarvis ran the numbers, he said nothing else would have worked.”

“Worked for intended capacity, which I’m going to assume was just powering the electromagnet to keep the shrapnel out of your heart without poisoning you by palladium toxicity.” Bruce shrugged. “Didn’t you tell me that any system prioritizes its power and algorithms based on a hierarchy of command? Jarvis was trying to save your life. That was the most important part of the equation according to his primary protocols. I can’t imagine he was trying to theorize alternate uses for the metals when you were at risk. That’s your job, not his.” He paused. “AI’s don’t actually dream of electric sheep, Tony. That’s the difference between artificial and organic intelligence. The ability to be creative.” 

“Dum-E is an AI, Jarvis was a person,” Tony finally argued. 

“Still not organic,” Bruce consoled. “He may have expanded on his basic programming, but he was still based on what you’d programmed years ago. He didn’t dream, did he?”

Tony winced and looked away. “Yes, Vision did. But I don’t know how much of that was Jarvis and how much was the Mind Stone. I’d assume more of the latter.” 

Bruce looked down at the book in front of him and said, “I’m sorry about Vision. We tried to help him.”

“I know,” the engineer replied. 

Now would be the time to change the subject away from that particular minefield. “Selvig used iridium to allow the Tesseract to generate a portal through space. That might be a possibility, but I’m assuming that you haven’t tried vibranium either. At this point, maybe we should be working our way through the periodic table until we find something that does work.”

“Probably wouldn’t hurt to try the kitchen sink. Shuri probably wouldn’t begrudge me a tiny bit as long as we don’t blow up her kingdom.” 

Wong returned at exactly the wrong moment, and seemed wholly unimpressed as he deposited some writing utensils on the table. 

“We would never-”

“C’mon, I highly doubt people around here don’t accidentally blow stuff up,” Tony retorted, reaching for one of the pencils. “Thanks. Relax, Bruce, you saw him fighting those guys in New York. I think he’s fine with explosions as long as they’re far away from things that burn really well.”

Wong glanced between them deadpan. “He’s not wrong.” 

“You’re not a stereotypical librarian,” Bruce stated, before turning back to his friend. “Since we’re not in front of everyone at the moment… how did you plan to try and undo Zero-Hour, Tony?”

The billionaire paused mid-word and then said, “I don’t know. I mean, we don’t even remotely know the full capacity of the Infinity Stones. We just know what the tiniest snap of his fingers did. Since Wong and Strange were the two closest things we had to authorities on the subject, that’s why we came in the first place. So I’m hoping he can explain what he got out of my brainpan from his BFF.” 

The sorcerer sighed softly and conceded, “There is the possibility that the Infinity Gems can undo what they have wrought. They were present at the creation of the universe, they have powers beyond our understanding. Stephen scratched the surface at one point, but the Time Stone can move a person forward or backward in time indefinitely. It has the ability to undo this cataclysmic event, but the fight will remain and Thanos will still be there.”

“So… theoretically, the Time Stone could change everything. We could go back in time, destroy the stones before Thanos had the chance to get a hold of them and this never would have happened,” Bruce theorized.

“You’ve never used the Time Stone. Items of great magic and/or power tend to be very choosy about their allegiances. It might not work for you, and it would have to be a very localized bubble. None outside would remember what had happened.”

“Except that this would destroy what remains of this reality. It would never have happened,” Tony pointed out.

“We would never have lost them at all,” the physicist declared, seeing a glimmer of hope in the situation.

As usual, Tony seized the position of devil’s advocate. “But we could be setting ourselves up for so much worse. Imagine Thanos coming to Earth with the Chitauri as well as the Outriders. Imagine they actually tried to destroy Earth the same way they did Xandar. Those things are damn near indestructible, the Stones would have survived even if every last living being on Earth didn’t,” Tony pointed out. 

“Xandar?” Wong asked.

“Burned. According to our intelligence, Thanos burned Xandar to a crisp, and more worlds besides. And of course, that sort of a cockamamie plan is predicated on getting one stone out of a gauntlet controlled by a madman.” He frowned and continued. “Practicality aside, there has to be a line in the sand, a place we can’t go back any further or we are going to butterfly effect ourselves right out of existence. Zero-Hour sounds like a plan, if we can undo what the Infinity Gauntlet did,” the engineer replied, flipping to another page. “And I can’t believe I’m talking about time travel like it’s a viable option. We are seriously screwed if we’re down to magic and science fiction.”

Wong gave Tony an assessing look. “I think you’re right about the targeted time.”

“Why?” Bruce queried, wondering why that arbitrary time was the best choice.

“Because what was the status of Thanos’ armies right at Zero-Hour?” Wong asked, the term unfamiliar on his tongue. 

“All of his allies were dead, we’d put a pretty good dent in the Outrider army.” 

“Then he was vulnerable, and Stephen was setting the board for the remainder of the conflict. That’s why he bargained for your life, Stark. He needed you alive for the end.”

“But why?” Tony asked plaintively as if he truly couldn’t understand why someone would wish to save him. “You said it was like a chessboard; I have never had the patience for the game.”

For all that Tony didn’t have patience, that was a lie. He’d always been interested in the long-game. In making absolutely certain that Earth had a fighting chance. From day one, he’d saved them, he’d avenged them, he’d gathered Earth’s heroes together and made a stand whenever he needed to. He’d kept the Avengers together longer than even Nick Fury had probably believed possible. If it was a chess game, then they needed more pieces to make the endgame come out in their favor. 

“Tony, this was never a battle that any of us should have had to fight alone,” Bruce conceded. “Thor tried to fight him alone, and Thanos murdered his entire race, plus the slaves we freed on Sakaar. We came together when we needed to, and yeah, we got our ass kicked, but we had so much more of a chance when we were together. We were always stronger when we were together. Not standing beside each other. You've always been a crucial part of the Avengers, and we needed you alive for whatever comes next.”

“That hasn’t been the case for years, Bruce. Too much water under the bridge-”

Bruce sighed, because maybe he had been off of Earth for far too long, but what Natasha had told him was not what he wanted to hear. He’d been the first to admit that the Avengers were a powder keg, an unstable chemical reaction waiting to go off, but he hadn’t hoped for it. He’d hoped that when the chips were down, they could at least work together for the common good. “The entire time I’ve known you, I have never in my life heard you accept that there was anything in this galaxy that you couldn’t fix. Why the hell are you starting now?”

The intense look that Tony gave him was one he had never seen before. “Maybe because I’m not entirely convinced that I want it fixed, okay? We can be heroes, Bruce, and still be cowards when it comes down to the fights where we can’t punch our way out.”

Wong allowed a dubious look and then scribbled down a few notations on his own sheet of paper. 

“What happened, anyway?”

“Lots of baggage. Love and kumbayas are not going to fix this, Banner. ” 

“No, but it can be fixed.”

“Can it? I believe science can fix anything up until the point where people are involved. People are unpredictable and squishy and there are intangible aspects of human existence that we still don’t understand so that even if we get them physically back there is no guarantee that what we get back will be alive. Even if by some miracle we manage to unravel Thanos’ actions, you think the entire world that survived is going to miraculously forget that they watched people they loved and cared about crumble into dust? Because I won’t. I won’t ever be able to forget it, even if I tried. Right now, the Time Stone sounds like the best option because it can erase all of this, but who gets to hold onto that memory forever?”

Making anyone keep the memory of Zero-Hour seemed cruel, but honestly, he hadn’t lost anyone as dearly as the others had. It was a burden that Bruce would bear if he could. 

“Some things will never be fixed, Bruce.”

He had to try some rational explanation. “Have you ever heard of kintsugi? The Japanese made an art of out of fixing broken pottery, lacquerware. They don’t hide the cracks, Tony. They believe the cracks give character, beauty. Fixing what is broken is commendable but we should never forget that it was broken in the first place.”

“If you get any more Zen on me, I’m going to stop listening to you, Banner,” Tony warned, his focus still on the book in front of him. 

Fine, on to the next piece of logic. “The biggest hurdle is talking to Steve and finding some common ground, and you’ve done that,” Bruce assured him. They needed something to build on, something to feel less powerless in the face of such overwhelming odds.

“Okay, let me level with you, here, since you’ve heard from Team Cap so that maybe you can have both sides of the story besides ‘Tony decided to be unreasonable again,’” he replied sourly. “After Sokovia, after you ran away and ended up playing Gladiator in space? Right before Ross got his hands on the UN Accords? Pepper and I had a big argument. Huge. Pepper made one **really** good point in her entire argument of good points. The difference between a superhero and a supervillain is about responsibility, about accountability. A villain never answers to anyone. Pepper was furious that after SHIELD fell, the Avengers had no oversight, no one to look objectively at us and say ‘that was wrong, you shouldn’t have done things that way.’”

“We can’t second-guess in the heat of the battle. And you yourself have been on national television telling the American government to go screw itself,” Bruce pointed out.

“The problem is not in the heat of the battle. The problem is when you look objectively at the numbers. When you add them all up, divide by the number of lives saved? I asked Vision to do that, once. The math was **staggering** and it wasn’t remotely in our favor. The Avengers don’t face the consequences of our actions, Bruce. Manhattan. Sokovia. Johannesburg. Seoul. Lagos.” He shook his head. “Pepper said that it was only a matter of time before a terrified world decided it needed saving **from** us.”

His last statement was as loud as a thunderclap in the library and Wong watched them both warily. 

“The Accords weren’t perfect. Nothing ever is. But they were a step in the right direction toward a better world, one in which maybe we wouldn’t have to fight the people we were trying to protect,” Tony stated calmly, turning his attention back to the book in front of him. “I have spent enough of my life reaping the whirlwind of my own shitty decisions that I am never going to apologize for taking the moral road this time.” 

“Even with Thunderbolt Ross involved?” Bruce asked, voice acrid. "Tony, you know the kind of man Ross is, you know what he's capable of, and you know what he's willing to do to get his way. Why would you ever have gotten in bed with him?

“Even a broken clock is right twice a day,” Tony answered. “He was one of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people who were demanding answers and accountability. For once, he said one thing that made sense, and you think I fell in goose-stepping line? I had my reasons.”

“Which like the love of God pass all human understanding?”

“Which you should understand, given you ran away from everything that you thought could remotely put people in danger. You're right. I knew that Ross was bad news. I helped destroy his career in the military after what happened with you, but Hydra left a vacuum in the US government which he filled. I wasn't allied with him, especially not when he used the Accords as his own personal sandbox. But I knew that devil and I knew how to play him because I have been manipulating men like him my entire professional life. It was only a matter of time before we had him and the Accords right where we wanted them, but Rogers has never figured out how to play the game. You knew you were dangerous from the instant the Hulk came into play. You removed yourself from the equation and that got rid of Ross' immediate leverage over us. I can’t blame you for that, but I can blame you for not being the voice of reason after the fact. You’re smart enough to see that the treatment can also be a bigger problem than the disease.” 

There it was, there was the painful truth Tony was so known for. He’d always been the worst possible person to get into a verbal argument with because he never pulled his punches and always wielded words like Natasha wielded knives. Sometimes, you were just left bleeding, unable to respond.

“Rogers and I are both going to believe that we’re right until the end of the universe itself, and it all depends on where you’re standing. But like I told him less than six hours ago, that’s not the issue right now. We have a much bigger fish to fry. So, quit trying to meddle and mend fences, Bruce, and brainstorm the actual problem.”

Wong turned a page, looking between them like they were having a lover's quarrel in the middle of the Library of Congress. "That'd be a good idea," he stated dryly.

Tony turned the page in a different direction and frowned minutely. He held it up and pointed to it, turning his focus to the sorcerer. “Please, for the love of Turing, do not tell me that this is how thermodynamics turn into your squiggly light things.”

“Yes,” Wong replied simply, wincing mildly as the billionaire dropped the book to the table with an audible slap.

Tony’s head went into his hands and Bruce finally enjoyed watching someone else shatter Tony’s worldview instead of the other way around. Thankfully, the billionaire didn’t start hyperventilating, he simply sat and breathed through the stress until the pieces of the universe started realigning.

As much as Tony liked to pretend that the idea of Zen was not for him, there were parallels between how he dealt with things and the ascetics Bruce had studied. Watching Tony Stark learn was like watching someone meditate, focusing on one thing to the exclusion of all else, moving mechanically as if on autopilot as he spread information around him in a semicircle. It was usually this point he’d use one of his AI to fold the new field into whatever paradigm he’d been working on previously. But he didn’t ask Friday to do anything, he just kept looking between the pages he’d scribbled on and the books in front of him.

Bruce had watched Tony assimilate data before, but it had never been on quite this scale at the time. He was used to helping someone revolutionize a field, but never one of this particular magnitude of quantum leap. Because this wasn’t exactly a scientific field.

“Talk to me, Tony. What are you thinking?”

“Thor once said that the field we called science and what he called magic were one and the same. It’s all energy and matter, just controlled in different ways,” the billionaire murmured softly. “Following that logic, the spells, the light show these guys do? Input A, out comes B. It's all programming, just a different language and a slightly different outcome. I have programmed the repulsors that when I give command A, I get an output of this strength, this intensity, this diameter and this much force. It has to work the exact same way for a magical output. Somewhere in all of this, Bruce, are the parameters required for their ‘magic’ to work. The base-code of their technology is in this library.”

“You can’t just program this,” Bruce cautioned. “In just about every single reference I have ever heard to magic, Tony, there has to be some element of belief in the supernatural, you don’t have that.”

“If science and magic are two faces of the same coin like Thor says? Then I don’t have a problem, Bruce. I have never, in my life, believed that there was a rational problem that couldn’t be solved by science. Population growth is exponential. Food production only increases arithmetically. That makes the solution a matter of making the math fit. Running random possibilities through a think tank or a supercomputer until we come up with ideas that work. That is how science works. This is one more method. It needs belief?” he asked, looking directly into Wong’s soul.

“Yes. Belief, faith, and conviction.”

“Strange had those,” he conceded. “He believed that what he was doing was the right thing, and even though he knew it had to mean **his** death, he gave Thanos the Stone.” Tony scrubbed at his face with his left hand, weariness foremost in his posture.

“He knew you were the only chance we had, Stark. You don’t need the Time Stone to see possibilities. You see them in your dreams and in your waking, in everything you see and do. You’ve already seen the way to get the answers you seek and now it’s just a matter of getting from point A to point B,” Wong replied solemnly. 

Tony drummed his fingers on the table and then flipped back and forth to three different pages before scribbling out a quick translation matrix. “If it’s all programming, then I just have to learn a new way to code.”

Bruce confusedly watched as the page filled with chicken-scratch that thankfully, Tony understood. 

He rubbed at his chin and drew something that looked remarkably like the arc reactor but began overlaying one of the sorcerer’s mandalas. Then another, again and again until the page was full. Every intricate pattern was subtly different, some with whirls and curves where others were jagged lines. Tony didn’t stop drawing, though, labeling each one with a number and a short equation underneath. Like a man possessed, he flipped through the book, writing a mathematical proof in magic.

Wong started to grin more and more with every symbol Tony added to his paper, getting up to bring another tome closer. “This one focuses on quantum variations and dimensional spells.” He patted Bruce on the shoulder and sat back down. 

Bruce, meanwhile, started brainstorming different metals that had the right thermal and electrical conductivity for what they needed to do. Which, why not reinvent physics again? It wasn’t working for them at the moment, so there was no better time to demolish every natural law they knew.

A common theme when Tony was involved.

Hours later, Tony shook the cramps out of his hand and looked around at the several dozen pages of data as if in a daze. 

“So, Tony. What’s the plan?” Bruce asked, setting his cup of oolong aside as he surveyed the damage the billionaire had wrought in his fugue. 

“I have to build an arc reactor with a new core that can tear a hole in quantum realities until I either find the universe in which we win or until I find a person who can tell me how to kill Thanos and get our friends back. I need to find a Stephen Strange who survived. And I’m going to have to use magic to make it work.” He looked up at Bruce through bleary eyes. “I’m only going to have time for one, Bruce.”

“Then it’ll have to do. Thanks, Wong.”

“When you need us, call,” the sorcerer replied, before opening a portal back into the Wakandan sunshine. 

Tony gathered the papers, looking like a frazzled freshman at midterms. He crammed them into one of the books and said, “I'll bring it back later.” With that, he departed Kamar-Taj for their destiny.

As if it had been wholly anticipated that the man would take off with one of the books from his library, Wong merely allowed a moue of amusement to cross his face. “And you thought it would be enlightenment in a spiritual sense that you would receive,” he reminded Bruce. 

“Would that help?”

“If you are successful, you may have time to attempt it,” Wong replied with a smirk. “Do us all a favor and don't let your friend approach this conflict with suicidal intent. Stephen was a healer, he meant for there to be life, not death. Stark is more driven than most, but more critical than he knows. There may be sacrifice; it need not be his.”

Bruce blinked calmly, screwing up his face in mild confusion.

Tony ducked back in front of the portal, clearly irritated by the delay. “Banner, what in the hell are you waiting for? Science!!”

Bruce waved a hand over his shoulder and said, “I'd say he wasn’t usually like this, but that would be a lie.”

The sorcerer waved him off. “Namaste, Doctor Banner. We will return your jet shortly. Oh, and if you find Stephen before I do, please don’t tell him that Stark learned magic in a fraction of the time that it took him. Stephen would be as insufferable as Stark.”

Bruce blinked twice and then looked through the portal at Tony. 

Wong handed him one last piece of paper with a series of numbers on it and then gestured to the future ahead of him.

With no small amount of trepidation, he walked through the ring of sparks and waved as Nepal disappeared, leaving only the oppressive heat of Wakanda. They had a past to stop and a future to save.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And next time, we finally figure out what happened to Hawkeye and Ant Man. Because, you know, they totally phoned it in during IW.


	6. Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We pick up our last two (ish) stragglers, and get the band back together. Fasten your seatbelts, kids, it's going to be a bumpy ride from here on out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only taking a slight turn out of left field on this one, but I was committed before I heard A&W spoilers. :-p Now having seen said movie, I have plans. Evil plans.
> 
> I am sorry about how long this chapter has taken to get out. Life got in the way, which I'm certain everyone can agree with. I’m editing on the next chapter, and I still plan to get this work wrapped up this year before Marvel retcons any more of my plans. *sigh* Working on it. I promise.

* * *

Scott sputtered back to life, collapsing on the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. Leaving the Quantum Zone felt something like being dipped into an ice-bath. He was breathless and weak, and Scott wasn’t entirely certain how long he’d been there, except that the answer was too long.

Shapes and colors failed to coalesce, and his vision grew dim around the edges. Nothing worked, not his arms or legs, and he laid there on the rooftop like he’d been run over by a truck. Even his toes stayed still when he tried to wiggle them. Not good. Blacking out again-

Scott was shoved over onto his back, and both arms were pinned over his head. With his helmet disengaged, he looked up at a hazy night sky full of light pollution. “Breathe,” a familiar voice commanded. Her hand rested on the center of his chest, just over his heart, as if bidding him to inhale. The warmth lingered through the suit, and when he obliged, her face began to coalesce into a familiar sight.

It wasn’t Hope. It was Ava. He hadn’t seen her since the confrontation in the lab a few weeks back, when she’d spent the better part of two days kicking his ass. Some moments, like now, he swore his bruises still had bruises.

He couldn’t decide if this was a continuation or if she’d saved his life instead. 

He rasped her name and screwed up his face in confusion. “What?” he asked breathlessly, barely audible over the ailing sirens. 

She sat back, long hair swinging with the motion before getting to her feet. In the silent way that the former spy always moved, she crossed to the control consoles that they’d set up for the mini reactor. 

“When Hope didn’t call, I did. When she didn’t answer, I hacked a cell phone company and traced her mobile. It’s right over there,” she stated, moving to stop the quantum generator. Her tone was breezy, matter-of-fact, but it still held enough intensity that she scared him a little. Ava had gone into hiding after their confrontation, fallen off the grid except for a few cryptic messages from Bill to Hank. 

It had only made sense. The dregs of SHIELD couldn’t have been happy she’d bailed on them, and the destruction they’d caused in San Francisco had been enough to draw the FBI’s notice. 

Even Scott had had to lay very low, and they had never been able to prove he’d been involved. Part of him still couldn’t believe that they’d managed to pull the wool over Woo’s eyes a few weeks back. Still, no one fell into a life of crime if they didn’t think to some extent that they’d be able to get away with it.

“What do you mean didn’t answer? Where is she? Where are they?” he asked, still a borderline whisper. 

“They’re gone.”

That they hadn’t been the ones to pull them out was a hell of a shock, but then again, he had just been left in the Quantum Zone for hours. The world was simultaneously too bright and too flat, too rounded and too angular. Everything hurt, from the tips of his toes to the roots of his hair, and Scott shook his head again, trying to clear it but just managing a to make a massive migraine worse. Nothing made sense.

Nothing she said made sense.

Ava tapped at a few keyboards and then sighed. “I’m glad you got the particles. I’m starting to destabilize again.”

“Yeah, I’m glad I got them too,” he conceded, finally able to move again. “What do you mean gone?”

The pause that followed was just a little too long, before the pale-eyed woman continued. “I think I know what happened to your girlfriend, but you’re not going to like it.” She took a fortifying breath. “If what this instrument says is true, you’ve been in there for a fraction over twelve hours. I take it that’s the longest you’ve ever been in the Quantum Zone?”

“First time was less than a minute,” he admitted. “Just long enough to get into real trouble, but I got myself out.” He’d had to. That sort of focus was hard to shake. But he’d trusted Hope and Hank to get him out of the Zone today with no problems. Even in a malfunctioning Ant-Man suit, they should have had control over the whole process.

Should have didn’t seem to be good enough, and after he’d screamed into the void long enough to go hoarse, he’d narrowly avoided the tardigrades and the time vortex. Twelve hours? What had gone so wrong that he’d been unable to escape, that the people he’d trusted with his life were unable to call him back?

Yeah, he was never doing this again. Not without someone **in** the drink with him, because twice he’d been in the Quantum Zone. The first time, by accident, he’d gotten out by knowing that he had to save his little girl from Yellow Jacket. Thinking of Cassie didn’t get him out this time, but maybe that was because he’d ended up there with a suit that was constantly on the fritz.

Just out of curiosity, he tapped his suit’s controls and they were dark. Great. At least Ava got him back real-sized, because the alternative would have been difficult to cope with. “I shouldn’t have been in there more than ninety seconds. I had the particles you needed in less time than that,” he apologized. “But… they didn’t answer. Our link shouldn’t have been cut.”

“I know why they didn’t respond,” Ghost replied, her eyes trained on shutting down the reactor in the van. Her fingers on the keys echoed loudly in the silence. “You probably shouldn’t talk. You sound like you were gargling gravel.”

“Apparently, I’ve been screaming myself hoarse for the past twelve hours,” he replied, bringing a gloved hand to his head.

“Been there, done that,” she muttered sarcastically. 

“Okay,” he said, narrowing his eyes as he pushed himself up on an elbow. “So if I shouldn’t talk, maybe you should.”

As if he was dragging the words out of her with a pair of pliers, Ava did start talking. “Twelve hours ago, the planet suffered an inexplicable cataclysm. It wasn’t anything you did, at least, I think it wasn’t,” Ava offered in a soft voice. “Some people just fell into ash in an instant.”

She studiously avoided glancing at the ground at her feet, and from his vantage point, he couldn’t see there either. Scott didn't know if he wanted to, if that would make it real.

“The emergency alerts have been sounding for hours. No one knows anything, there’s been no word from the UN, the President… nothing,” she admitted. “Planes have crashed, motor vehicles abandoned in the streets, children in the park, simply gone.”

It was too horrible to think about. People melting away like a horror story that even Stephen King hadn’t thought of. Oh, god. Cassie. Hope. His mind ping-ponged the two names back and forth, and he was at a loss of what to do until his phone rang with his daughter’s ringtone echoing in the chaotic city around them.

“Cassie!” Scott exclaimed, pushing himself up from the ground and fighting against the pins and needles in his legs. He flailed for the phone until Ava pressed it into his hand, hitting the ‘answer’ button. “Cass?”

 _“Daddy?!?”_ came the tearfilled response. _“Daddy, where have you been?”_

“Sorry, baby, I got tied up doing a work thing,” Scott blurted quickly before saying anything further. “Are you okay?”

 _“Mommy’s gone!”_ she wailed before breaking off into heart-wrenching sobs.

He finally sat up fully, heart pounding in his chest. “Is Paxton there?” he asked her. “Cassandra Eleanor Lang, is your stepfather there?”

She finally slowed her breaths and said, _“Yeah.”_

Taking another deep breath because *one* person in this conversation couldn’t panic, Scott held it for a count of three and then said, “Right, go hand him the phone. Now.”

“Three names,” Ava replied, impressed.

“My daughter probably saw my ex-wife die and thought I was dead too. Maybe you can tease me about talking to my kid later?” he snapped.

There, a flicker of empathy settled in Ava’s expression. From what he remembered of her story, she’d seen the same thing of her parents. “Bill’s gone too,” she conceded softly. “That’s why I needed to find you.”

Damn. Foster had been a good guy if a little misguided. If anything, Scott identified with him a little too much. He didn’t really want to think about what he’d do if his daughter needed someone the same way Ava needed help.

He’d raze the Earth itself to ash if it would save his little girl. Well, maybe not the entire world, but yeah, there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for the right reasons.

Paxton didn’t wait for his musings to end, though. After some muffled movement on the other end, there was another familiar voice. _“Lang, where the hell are you?”_ the cop demanded breathlessly.

He rattled off the address of the parking garage where they’d parked that morning. 

_“I’ll send someone. The city’s a fucking mess,”_ he murmured softly, as Cassie’s voice subsided in the background. 

“Maggie?” Scott asked tentatively, hoping against hope it was a child's hyperbole.

 _“Gone. Thought you were too.”_ Paxton sighed heavily and then continued. _“Listen, stay put, we’ll figure this out. Don’t get into any trouble.”_

“Me? Trouble? C’mon, Paxton, it’s like you don’t know who you’re talking to.”

The call-waiting ring sounded, and Scott pulled the phone away from his face to read the identity. His heart skipped a beat, and he silently cursed. 

He knew that number, even if he hadn’t seen it in two years. Even if it had never been programmed into his phone since the FBI had it tapped. Even if he knew for a fact that it had to be life or death for him to get a call.

It was pretty god-damned hard to forget Captain America’s phone number.

His heartbeat thundered in his ears and Scott closed his eyes before bringing the phone back to reply to the cop.

“Jim,” he said numbly. “I’ll be downstairs in a few, just… I think I have to take this call.”

The response sounded mumbled through the end of a tunnel. 

He flicked the ‘answer’ icon and waited. “Hello?”

 _“Ant-Man. Thank God you’re alright. We need you,”_ Rogers stated firmly. His tone was grave and unhurried, like he was giving a speech instead of calling an old friend. 

But so did Cassie. Cassie needed him. 

Not for the first time, Scott remembered that it was rough being a superhero and a father. “Need me like Leipzig?” he asked. He’d ended up with a boatload of consequences and it was only through a good lawyer and a shit-ton of tap-dancing that he ended up on house arrest and not back in jail. 

The odd tone that the Avenger used in replying was enough to show it wasn’t a trick. A tiny tremor wavered in his voice. _“We need you like it’s the end of the world.”_

“Yeah, I caught that,” he answered. “How long do I have?”

 _“Natasha should be sending coordinates now, we’ll be there in six hours.”_

He’d take it. “I’ll be ready. I’ve been under house arrest for two years and in a situation for the last twelve hours, so you’ll have to get me up to speed, but I’ll be there, Captain.”

The call ended, and he glanced to Ava. “I have no idea what’s going on, but I know some people who sound like they do.” He reached out with one hand, and hefted the container, holding it out to her. 

What he’d struggled to get back from the Quantum Zone were the particles she needed to survive, to keep her quantum instability from tearing herself apart. But she made no movement to take them. 

“Who?” she asked calmly.

“Captain America. The Avengers.”

“They were SHIELD,” she hissed.

“From what I can tell, he burned an entire agency to slag because it was the right thing to do when it was infiltrated by Hydra. You might like him.”

“Doubtful,” Ava scoffed. 

He looked down at the seventy four missed calls and fifty texts. Swiping them away, he found the Presidential Emergency alert on the phone and shook his head. “It’s up to you. But when Steve Rogers says it’s the end of the world, I don’t think he’ll turn anyone away from the fight.”

She narrowed her eyes but gave a terse nod. “Let’s get this stowed in case I need it again. If you get killed being heroic, I might have to take up residence in the Quantum Zone to survive.”

“It won’t come to that. If I can figure out what happened, maybe we can find a way to undo this, get them all back. Bill included,” he offered.

“You should know better than to believe there’s such a thing as a happy ending, Scott Lang,” Ava chided, her voice sad as she phased through a laptop accidentally. She clenched her left hand in a tight fist, shaking it in and out of phase. “God knows I don’t.”

Scott swallowed resolutely. Heroes had to believe that they were doing the right thing, but daddies had to make sure everything was okay for their children. There were few harder jobs in the universe than that today. “I can believe in a happy ending for someone who isn’t me.” 

Maybe someday he’d get another chance at his own.

* * *

Three people stood at the edge of the airfield; one was half the size of the other two, and held the hand of another. The girl’s dark hair blew in the wind caused by the Quinjet’s exhaust. 

Leaving Cassie was never going to get any easier. Doing the wrong thing for the right reason had forced him to miss so much of her life; first prison, then Wakanda, then house arrest. Someday, Cassie was **not** going to be there when he got back, and that was what he dreaded most of all: the day she realized he wasn’t worth her faith.

Her hand in his was a weight that grounded him, that had brought him back from the Quantum Zone in the first place.

His little girl had always believed in the fact that he was a hero not because he had superpowers, but because she called him Dad. 

“You’re sure about this?” Paxton asked, his voice a dubious low rumble. 

The truth was, no, he wasn’t. But Cap made one hell of a sales pitch, every time they’d spoken. Not trusting his mouth to say the right words instead of the doubts that plagued him, he nodded. 

He knew what he was risking. This was his third chance. Prison had been his first. The Accords were his second. 

He’d never known when to cut his losses and stay. Today wasn’t going to be any different than the last time he’d risked everything. Except everything had changed while he wasn’t looking.

His two-year house arrest had been the greatest blessing, because Maggie’d shared their daughter more than the custody agreement had stipulated. As if Cassie was the way to keep Scott on the straight and narrow, she’d moved heaven and earth to keep their piecemeal family together. Despite their rocky start, even Paxton, the cop, had been committed to Scott’s rehabilitation as if it were a personal mission.

Now Maggie - the glue that held their shattered lives together - was gone like so much dust on the wind, and Scott was leaving their daughter again. He was risking his freedom again, for the chance to fix everything that had gone wrong while he was in the Quantum Zone. He knew it was bad, just not how bad, or how he could help. Still, Scott was walking away from their future together, one more time. 

The white-knuckled grip on his hand tightened as the ramp came down on the Quinjet. Scott squeezed back, trying to gently reassure his daughter one last time.

Cassie’s eyes were already red-rimmed from the day’s exhaustion and loss. Scott turned to kneel in front of his only daughter, tucking chesnut tresses that matched his own behind her ear. “Sweetie,” he began softly. “I gotta go.”

“Daddy, no,” she said, eyes brimming full of tears. The first drops slipped free of already wet lashes and ran down her face. 

Scott brought his hand to Cassie’s cheeks, wiping each one free of the traces of her sorrow. “Cassie, something very very bad has happened, and I’ve got to try and help.”

“What if you die too?” his daughter sobbed. 

“If anything happens to me, and it *won’t*, Cassie. But if it does, then Jim is going to take care of you just like he has been, because he’s a pretty decent not-Dad,” he replied, flicking a glance at the cop who’d picked up the pieces of his family after Scott had ended up in prison. “And you’re going to be strong and you’re going to be okay, Cass. I know it.”

She sniffled and threw herself at him, hugging him tightly and burying her face in his chest. “It’s not fair.”

Scott wrapped both arms around her and closed his eyes, breathing in the scent of her strawberry shampoo. It had been Cassie who had been able to pull him out of the Quantum Zone, to bring him back from the brink on more than one occasion. She was his reason for being, and maybe the only thing in his life he’d ever gotten exactly right. 

She was far too young to believe that life wasn’t fair, even if he told her it wasn’t. Let her keep that innocence for one more day. He pressed a kiss to her forehead and said, “It’s going to be okay, Cassie. I promise.”

“Promise you’ll come back,” she whimpered.

“You got it,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure he would. This wasn’t a street-fight in Germany, it wasn’t stealing something from a supervillain. This was so much more. He’d been lucky so far, so very lucky, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that someday he’d run out of luck. But he was doing this for the chance that she’d grow up. That was all that he could ask for. He carded a hand through her hair and pulled back from the embrace. “Paxton, take care of our daughter.”

He nodded. “Always,” the cop confirmed in a promise that Scott could never keep. 

With one last squeeze of Cassie’s hand, he hefted his bag and strode to the jet, nodding to Captain America as he walked up the plane’s ramp. “Steve.”

“Scott, glad you could make it.”

A flicked backward glance found Paxton consoling his daughter with an arm around her shoulder. The cop reached down and picked her up, letting her cry on his suit jacket. 

Cassie wasn’t the only Lang reduced to tears as a sharp ache took up residence in Scott’s chest. He blinked back the worst of it and with an unsteady voice lied, “I’m ready to go.”

“You’re our first pickup, so anywhere you’d like to sit,” Steve answered, gesturing around at the empty seating in the main cabin.

In one moment, a scant flicker of light caught his eye and was gone just as quickly. He sat back with a lightness in his heart he hadn’t felt earlier.

“Is Sam...?” he ventured, seeing the jet mostly empty.

“Gone,” Steve supplied.

Scott nodded. “I wasn’t exactly on this plane when the world went to hell, so you’re going to have to explain it to me, Cap.”

“The Quinjet?”

“This plane of existence. Hank figured out a way to miniaturize people using Pym particles, it’s how the Ant-Man suit works. They can make you small enough to get into the Quantum Zone, it’s this place between atoms, and if you’re not careful, you can get lost in there. Maybe that’s why I made it out alive,” Scott hypothesized. “From what I hear, a lot of people died today.”

As Natasha got them underway, Cap sat, raking a hand through his dull blond hair. “Yeah. A lot of good people did,” he admitted.

Okay. Essentials, time to stop dwelling. 

“The suit’s been on the fritz recently, so I grabbed all the Pym particles I could find, but if we need to get this suit working, I’m going to need some help. It’s not like Hope or Hank left me an owner’s manual, not that they’d give it to me after Leipzig.” He scoffed minutely, and said, “I got a plea-bargain, they got to be fugitives for the past two years. I didn’t use the suit for the vast majority of the time.”

“The world isn’t exactly fair, even if you’re on the winning side. But, if anyone in the world can help you fix the suits, they’ll be in Wakanda,” Steve tried his best to reassure. “Most of the Avengers are already there.”

The younger man nodded. “So, that’s where we’re headed?”

“Quick stop at the Barton household, and then we’re on our way. Do you need anything to eat or would you rather catch a few z’s?”

The ex-convict shook his head minutely. “If I drop off, just let me. I can sleep anywhere, I promise. I mean, I just finished my two years of house arrest before a week of fighting for my life. I was well rested, and then I got stranded in the Quantum Zone, and well… I’m still not a hundred percent sure I got pulled out into the right universe. Because this? This sucks, sideways.”

“Natasha put together this briefing for you,” Steve offered, handing over a tablet. “Just so we’re on the same page.”

“Thanks,” Scott answered, taking the StarkPad and opening up the information. 

But as soon as Steve moved to the cockpit, Scott got out his phone and flipped to the photo album, flipping through family photos until the urgency of crying subsided. Prison and flying both gave him way too much time to think about his life and what he had chosen once more to leave behind.

An unseen hand squeezed his, and through his tears of self-doubt, he said, “Thanks, Ava,” and got back to work.

* * *

“Clint?” Natasha thought she was going to be sick when she strode into Clint’s house, finding the piles of ash on the hardwood floor. It was hard to tell which pile belonged to which Barton, but the sandy-haired archer sat sprawled beside them, tightly gripping a smaller form. 

No wonder Tony’s thermal imaging hadn’t been able to tell them apart. Nathaniel remained in his father’s arms, crying softly as he squirmed against an iron grip. His face was red and somewhat sunken, nowhere near the picture of health he’d been on their last communication.

What had always been an idyllic chaotic mess of children and toys and love was now a cold, silent as a mausoleum. 

She’d been through some people’s definition of hell, but now she knew Clint’s. It was so much worse than even her imagination could have conjured.

“Clint,” she spoke softly, trying to jar him out of his misery, even as one of the ash piles shifted in the breeze to reveal a purple crayon. It had to be Lilah. The lump that grew in her throat rendered her speechless.

“What the fuck happened?” he breathed, unseeing gaze still fixed on his dead family.

Shaking herself instead of him, she barked, “Clint, get up. There is nothing you can do here.”

“What. Happened?”

“Thanos. He came for the Infinity Stones. He got them, this is all him.”

“Thanos,” Clint breathed, as if remembering something from his time as Loki’s thrall. It rolled off his tongue too easily, his gaze distant rather than on the remains of his family. 

“Scott’s on the plane with Steve. We need to go before Ross figures out we’re here. He threatened to arrest us when we turned up at the Compound, and I can’t imagine it’s gotten any better.” Natasha took a deep breath and then said, “I don’t want to have to carry you, but I will. Get moving.”

Mechanically, the archer got to his feet, still clutching his toddler tightly to his chest with one arm. Without disturbing the remains of any of his family, he moved to the secure weapons storage Nat had helped him put in. 

She skirted around in the other direction and headed for Clint’s closet. There was always a bug-out bag filled with essentials. Years of being an agent of SHIELD and also simply paranoia meant that Clint was always ready when the phone rang. She picked up the burner phone and saw it had eight missed calls, including one from Fury. 

Returning that call would probably be just as fruitless as calling him from Wakanda had been. They were out of options, unfortunately. 

That couldn’t be changed. Natasha had to focus on things she could do. Nathaniel would be coming with them, so she started raiding the cabinets for easily digestible food. That went into a backpack, probably Cooper’s. Clothes were next, then toys and a well-worn blanket. 

By the time Clint returned from the basement, Natasha was ready to go. The eerie stillness in the home was only echoed by Clint’s demeanor. Where he was easy-going and affable, he was now neither. There was an economy of movement that reminded her of a man she thought long-gone. 

This wasn’t Hawkeye. Not really. He put his foot up on a kitchen chair and broke off the ankle monitor that had been promised to him for another year. The loud clank made Nate jump, but he only buried his face further into Clint’s body armor. 

“Let’s go,” she urged as the monitor went red and started alerting. 

He didn’t have to be told twice. Without a backward glance at the unfortunate bodies of his wife and older children, Clint headed straight for the Quinjet. 

“I’ll bring him back, Laura,” she breathed. But exactly who she’d be bringing back was not an answer she had. 

Thanos had burned the heart out of one of the deadliest men Natasha had ever known. 

It had been a foolish move on the Titan’s part.

In the days before Laura, before SHIELD, when their paths had crossed, Clint had been an assassin with no master, fewer morals and absolute precision. They’d gone after the same target more than once, and ended up on opposite sides as well. 

Hawkeye had always been manageable, someone she could beat. Hawkeye was always on target.

She returned to the jet after locking up the house, striding up the ramp with renewed purpose. 

Steve looked shocked speechless, and she directed him to the cockpit in order to get them moving again. 

For a child that was supposed to be named after her, she’d had the dubious honor of never having seen Nate since he learned to walk. She had never begrudged Clint his plea deal after Leipzig, not when it meant coming home to his wife and children. It had been a small mercy, one she had never had a chance to get. Even as small as her transgressions had been, she still had things to answer for and she never had. 

Instead, the child named after her was a stranger. He looked at her with wariness and then glanced away, all his concentration back on his father instead.

It shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did.

Nate was strapped in as best he could be but still held onto his father’s hand. It seemed to be the only thing grounding him to this world. 

“Thanos,” Clint ground out. 

Scott jumped minutely. 

“I assume there’s a plan,” he murmured.

Steve engaged the autopilot and headed back, sitting down on a bench. “Tony and I are working on a course of action.”

The stony silence was expected, but Clint's next statement wasn't. “Steve, that is quite possibly the least reassuring statement you could have uttered.”

Natasha bit her lip. “Clint, you know we need him. We need everyone.”

From the look on his face, he knew, but he didn’t have to like it. 

“Ronin.”

He flicked a lazy glance in her direction, acknowledging the codename.

“He doesn’t have many weak spots, but we’ll find one.”

The stony expression on Clint’s face told her that he would be the one to find it. He’d always been a good strategic mind, but it was when he got too close that he stopped being Hawkeye, the agent with perfect vision. 

Loki had stolen that distance, and Pietro’s death had forced him out of the game. Everything had become too close, too personal.

Despite what she’d told both Steve and Tony, there was no telling what this catastrophe had done to her partner.

Only time would tell if her guess was the right one, that he’d be focused and ready for vengeance. It was an uncertainty that the Black Widow could scarcely bear.

* * *


	7. In A Sky of a Million Stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An old friend offers some questionable advice, self-doubt abounds, and maybe someone has a little bit of luck. Another bridge chapter before we start seeing some resolution, and some concrete plans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this chapter kept getting derailed, and then well, someone showed up and took it over. You'll see. Anyways, started writing this bit after the Endgame trailer dropped in December, and I'm still not happy with it. Screw it. I'm putting it up before it gets completely retconned.
> 
> Still absolutely not Endgame compliant, still not sure about Captain Marvel. Just pretend she was off tripping the light fantastic and left the pager someplace warm. It's a big universe. She had something better to do?

_Who cares if one more light goes out?_  
In the sky of a million stars  
\-- Linkin Park

* * *

He woke to lingering pain and a gut-deep ache. His hands were borderline numb from cold, but Tony pushed himself off the floor with a shuddering sigh. Rust and bitterness clung to his mouth, and the taste of blood was hard to ignore. 

The darkness of space without an atmosphere beyond led to millions of pinpricks of light, more than he could even count. But he’d been in Wakanda… He knew he’d made it to Wakanda.

Beneath his fingernails were the dirt and dust of Titan, of Peter. The Iron Man suit sat, disassembled and broken on the deck nearby, discarded like a fractured toy. A touch to his midsection confirmed that he was still bleeding, still dying slowly in the dark and cold of space.

Muffled sounds that could only be cursing seemed to be coming from the ship’s power core, and though he’d probably have been able to help, moving didn’t seem like a stellar idea at the moment.

His breath clouded in front of his face, and his heart pounded in his ears as panic began to set in. Whether or not he’d managed to hallucinate the return to Earth that had been too easy or whether this was a dream of fear, well, he needed to know. Tony jabbed a finger into his wound, finding the tacky crimson coating his hand. Pain was a familiar friend, and sometimes, it managed to bring clarity.

The nightmare failed to waver, just as it had when he was in that cave in Afghanistan. Avoiding wiping the blood on his face, Tony cradled his head in his hands and studiously didn’t look at the glimmering balls of gas beyond a thin piece of glass. Tears welled against his will, and they blurred everything around the edges, making each pinprick flicker and dance as though an atmosphere. 

He imagined these were the same stars he’d seen during the battle of New York, and that was far from a comforting thought. He hated space. It had featured front and center in his nightmares for ten years. He’d been living on borrowed time ever since hearing Thanos’ name, since standing in the ruins of a city he still called home.

He’d been prepared to die every time he left Earth. He wasn’t prepared now, not yet. “This can’t be real. I can’t remember getting here, so this isn’t where I am. This has got to be a nightmare.”

“Is that so?” began a silky voice from the dim and deeply shadowed light of the damaged vessel around him. “Or was that an educated guess?”

Tony’s head whipped around, gaze settling on the familiar and ghostly pale face of Loki. He blurted the god’s name in horror, knowing there was no weapon, no way to defend himself. “Thor said that you were dead.”

A heaved sigh of impatience served as the first retort and he stepped into the faint starlight as though sauntering through a garden. “If you’re going to be absurd, this will be a fairly pointless conversation, Stark.” Leather creaked as he leaned against the buckled bulkhead, the gesture lazy and carefree. Luminous green eyes narrowed in on Tony’s face. “If, perhaps, you’re feeling a bit of urgency, I do implore you to begin contemplating your situation with all due haste.”

God, he hated Shakespeare. At least Thor was a lot less tedious to listen to. What had Thor told him about Loki? Not much, but all out of Barton’s earshot. Loki was quick-witted, sharp as the dagger he carried and had a massive love of tricks. But of late?

Thor had spoken about Loki’s death in the palace, before the most awkward meeting Tony had ever been a part of, and he included the explanation of the Kyoto fiasco in that estimation.

A room that clearly, Tony hadn’t seen, if he was here. “I never made it back to Earth?” he blurted.

A relieved expression was the reply.

“Th-that doesn’t make any sense. I have clear memories of Wakanda and Nepal. I know I’m working on something right now, but if I’m here, I can’t be there. Unless, I'm hallucinating.”

“This looks nothing like Midgard,” the demigod pointed out simply.

“No shit. We’re in space, somewhere.” Tony forced himself to think. After all, if Loki was here and was intent on screwing him over or outright killing him, Tony **had** to outthink the craftiest demigod he’d ever met. Right. “Hypothesis one: I’m dreaming this, I’m back on Earth safe and sound in Wakanda, and your brother told us you saw him die." He tilted his head and then squinted one eye at Loki before offering an alternative. "Hypothesis two: I never made it back to Earth, I have no reliable information as to your existence or demise, and I am in a universe of shit.”

“Very good, Stark. Maybe you will make it out of this alive. Thanos probably should have killed you while he had the chance. Of course, he considers your species little more nuisance than a gnat, though you may rank somewhat higher since you had thwarted his designs in the past. Still, he doesn't see you as a match. His problem, you see, has ever been one of arrogance.”

“Yeah, and that’s something that neither of us has even a passing familiarity with,” he blurted out without thinking.

To Tony’s abject surprise, Loki laughed amiably as he sat down on the deckplate between the Avenger and the remnants of his armor. It lit his face in a way that highlighted his youth. The trickster had to have been young for a god. “If my intended mission while as Thanos’ puppet was not the conquest and enslavement of your planet, we could have been friends, you and I.”

Yeah, probably not. “Instead, you got your neck snapped by Thanos.”

Loki scoffed and shook his head. “That is the point of existence, Stark. It ends. Even if you managed to heal the hole in your side, you’d just be dying with infinitesimally less haste. My fath- Odin lasted for thousands of your years, and even he withered and died.” He moved to sit next to Tony, taking up a position between the Iron Man suit and the billionaire. “I was always going to die one way or another, but not at Thanos’ hand. That was an unexpected complication after the destruction of Asgard.”

“Are you really dead?” he ventured hesitantly.

The trickster tilted his head minutely, assessing Tony carefully. “Would you find that a consolation?” 

“Not really, no.” Tony straightened up minutely before saying, “You were never the real threat.”

Loki smiled indulgently, like one would at a child who had grasped some tiny rudimentary lesson. “As to the direct answer, perhaps in this universe, I am. Perhaps I am a figment of your imagination, starring in an horrific hallucination whilst you perish. Perhaps in some other, I managed to conquer your pitiful race, and live as emperor of Midgard. Perhaps in another other universe, Thanos was murdered before his plan could come to fruition.”

“Yeah. Alternate universes. Working on that,” he stated, shivering as his breath fogged in the cooling ship.

“And if you’re not actually on Midgard, you’ll never accomplish it. You’ll suffocate to death in a matter of hours. If you are on your homeworld, you’re failing miserably all the same.”

A spike of pain at his temple heralded a migraine’s onset. Or, possibly just death due to hypovolemic shock. Tony rubbed at his forehead and decided to argue. “You know, pioneering a new field and trying to make a synthetic Infinity stone isn’t exactly easy, you arrogant ass. Especially when everyone else in the vicinity has no idea how your family managed it in the first place, let alone how to make it do something completely different.”

His tone was calm even as Tony's rose. “How many simulations have failed?”

“All seven hundred permutations so far.”

Loki considered the starlight, but who the hell knew exactly what it was that the madman saw. “This universe may not be one where you win. There are almost an infinite number out there, you know? Where we don’t survive, where we do…where your planet remained blissfully unaware of the threat of Thanos until it was far too late to know who you were fighting.”

“Yeah, Strange gave me the Cliff’s Notes on that one.”

The sinister demigod didn’t give in to the same ‘confused Golden Retriever’ expression as Thor, despite the slang. “As much as Thanos rambled incessantly about the need for balance, for an end to overpopulation, I don’t believe that he ever understood the concept of the cosmic equilibrium. He has caused more chaos than I had foreseen in my wildest dreams. He has raised vast armies, razed planets, and with a single snap of his fingers, sentenced half the universe to oblivion.”

“We’re going to get it back.”

“How?” was the sassy retort of disbelief and befuddlement.

“Working on it.”

Loki huffed derisively. “Your boundless optimism is only slightly less exasperating than Thor’s, and no more helpful. I’d say that it was a pity that you and I weren’t working together on this, but let’s face it, Stark. We’d have killed each other within half an hour of acquaintance, let alone the duration of this war you’re planning. It’s better you have Thor anyway.”

“Why do you say that?” Tony asked.

“My brother is strong enough to kill Thanos and the deaths of our entire people gave him good reason. You’re going to need that. I am no hero, Stark. I never was. I was never meant to be. Monsters never become heroes. I would gladly have sacrificed your entire world if it meant that I kept breathing. But more than his nature, Thor taught you one thing you would never have understood from me. Our idea of magic and the science you wield and cling to are limbs on the same tree. Find the correct branch and you can wield both. You knew that. That imbecile Strange must have told you.” 

“Oh, so you met him?”

There was the death stare that made him wonder whether Loki was planning to use his ribcage as a hat. 

“Sorry, for a ‘Sorcerer Supreme’ he wasn’t exactly helpful.”

Loki offered a dubious look before settling in even more comfortably. “Sages rarely are. I’ve known my share. I’ve buried a few. Sometimes, I didn’t even kill them.”

Still, he was fixated on the argument he **wanted** to have with Strange. “He knew, and he didn’t tell me. I mean, c’mon, Strange. A monologue, a manifesto, a freaking smoke signal. Something? Anything! I have been stumbling around in the dark, looking for anything that can get us out of this!” Tony ranted.

“Are you truly that egocentric? Why do you think you have anything to do with it?”

“He told me that giving Thanos the Time Stone had to be done, because I had to live.”

“Not very intelligent of him. After all, one man, against trillions. Surely you’ve done the arithmetic, in the deepest recesses of your self-doubt. Are you worth their lives? All of their lives? Even one of them?” Loki asked in that silky tone that sent a needle straight into Tony’s heart.

The answer was probably no. Tony definitely knew that. Before Afghanistan, he’d been a self-centered egotistical asshole. Somewhere along the line it had stopped being about privatizing world peace and become about saving the most precious bits of humanity, of their little corner of the globe. And with every single battle, the stakes just kept getting larger, like a tsunami looming over their corner of the galaxy. 

They were fighting a tide, and they weren’t going to win.

Loki’s eyes narrowed, as if seeing something that Tony couldn’t. “Refresh my memory, Stark. How, precisely, was I defeated on Midgard?”

“Hulk kicked your ass,” he responded bluntly. “Left a hell of a dent in my floor.”

The mage turned to him with an expectant gaze, waiting the answer in the same way that Wong had. Finally, he asked, “Truly? That beast, alone? He could never have stopped me. Not entirely. Even unconscious, the Chitauri kept right on coming through that portal.”

But Bruce hadn’t been alone. He’d had Tony, he’d had Thor and Hawkeye and Widow and Cap. They hadn’t needed an army. They’d needed a team. They needed all of the team to have a snowball's chance in Hell. That's what Loki was trying to bludgeon into his injury addled brain. 

“You told me then that you had someone to avenge. Will you avenge them now, Tony Stark?”

Except this time, it wasn’t Coulson. It was Peter and Strange and that idiot Barnes and Hawkeye’s entire family. But they had half a universe to avenge this time. It had always been a tall order. They had now what they always had. 

Each other. They had to let that be their strength, as hard as it was. He had to trust the last people in the universe that he wanted to trust, because they were the first people he had to trust.

“Trust me, I’m working on it.”

Loki hummed softly as though considering something. “Not hard enough. There’s something you’re missing whilst you pretend that you have the ability to do something that not even Asgard managed.”

“Really?” the billionaire asked sarcastically. “And what would that be?”

“The Infinity Gems were not tools, they were not inanimate objects without intent. They were artifacts of creation. They played a hand in the creation of the universe, and we never managed to do more than tame them because they were so powerful. You’re trying to outreach gods, and you might succeed. Gods think there is nothing more powerful than they. That is our limitation. You see something and see what it can be. You may need to unfetter yourself from the idea that anything is inanimate.”

“Oh, great. Because what I needed in my life while dying in a dead space ship in the middle of nowhere is more cryptic.”

“You’re trying to use spellwork to constrain something because you don’t understand it. It is nothing short of a miracle that you’re not dead yet. Rank amateurism is often fatal when you’re gambling with high stakes.”

“Yes,” he replied shortly, losing his temper with a dead spectre.

“You’re trying to build a machine, but you’re trying to power it with dead minerals. It’s not going to work,” Loki lectured.

Tony rolled his eyes. “I’m trying every known element on the planet!”

“Of the World-Tree? Of the worlds of Yggdrasil, Asgard was fine and rich. Vanaheim was resource-filled. Jotunheim was barren. Midgard was abandoned by the other realms because it is a planet of little to no power. No unique elements can be found on your world. It is backward and backwater, and scarcely worthy of being the world to determine the fate of the universe. It is a shame that it possesses no discarded, arcane, damaged weaponry that some imbecilic oaf left scattered about in a field in Norway.” He looked up from where he was considering his nails like he’d just gotten a manicure in Valhalla.

Tony straightened up like he’d received an electric shock. **That** was what happened to Mjolnir?!?

The god of mischief turned to him and smiled tightly. “Science alone will never get you where you need to be. I suggest you stop asking the beast what you need to do next and start trusting something that **never** trusted you.”

Without thinking about the wisdom of his next statement, Tony retorted, “You really need to start being nicer to Bruce.”

“Why? By your own admission, I’m dead, remember?” Loki mockingly tsked and then stood up. “Start thinking harder before you are as well. The only reason I am wishing you any fortune at all is that you’re most definitely going to need it, Stark. And so will **everyone** else.”

A bright green light flicked out of the god’s fingers and slammed into Tony, taking the breath out of his lungs.

The billionaire landed very hard on the sleek floor of Shuri’s laboratory in Wakanda, a virulent green pattern slowly fading before his eyes. 

“Tony, are you okay?” Bruce asked, at his side in a moment. 

Tony slapped his hand away and then blurted, “Friday, what would Uru do in the reactor?” He reached for a marker that he’d knocked off the work table and traced the vanishing sigil onto the smooth surface, trying to figure out what the trickster had given him.

_“Calculating,”_ she answered, hesitation clear in her voice. _“Insufficient data to predict, boss.”_

He pulled himself up off of the floor and winced at the headache. “Tell Steve we need him to pick up a hammer in Norway, then scan for Mjolnir and give him the coordinates.”

“Thor’s the only one who can lift it,” Bruce reminded him. “Where’d this come from?”

“I think Loki just paid me a little visit,” he answered breathlessly. “And Steve was the only one who budged Mjolnir when it was intact, but Loki said it was destroyed. He could probably have a chance now.” Tony raked a hand through his hair and said, “I could do without that man giving me nightmares.”

Bruce huffed a soft laugh. “Tony, Loki’s dead. Thanos slaughtered all of Thor’s people. I was there, remember?”

“It might not have been our Loki,” the engineer hedged. “If anyone would have figured out how to slip between worlds, don’t you think Thor’s little brother would have managed it?” The billionaire shook his head. “I am kind of getting sick of people wishing me luck, though. I have never once in my life believed in luck.”

“Believe me, at this point, I’ll settle for any and all divine assistance,” Bruce muttered. “I’ll go call Steve.” With a wary glance in dark corners as if Loki could jump out and say ‘boo,’ he headed into the hallway.

* * *

Steve flicked a wary glance at Natasha before putting his hand to the headset again. “I’m sorry, Bruce, can you say that again?” 

Bruce sighed and his weariness leached through the line. _“I need you to check out some coordinates on the way back. I know they’re out of the way, but if you haven’t left North American airspace yet, you’re the closest we have.”_

Yep, that was what he thought Bruce said.

“In **Norway**?” he asked incredulously, as his teammate met his glance with just as much skepticism.

_“Thor never told us where Mjolnir was destroyed, but Tony managed to figure out it was in Norway. I’m not entirely certain I trust his explanation of how he narrowed it down, but Friday confirmed Mjolnir’s… resting place using a sub-orbital scan. I’m sending the coordinates now. We need you to see if there’s any remnants you can bring back, any size. We’re playing a hunch because when Mjolnir was around, she wouldn’t let us get any readings.”_

“That’s a hell of a hunch,” Natasha breathed. 

Steve steeled himself as Natasha input the new heading. “Any news from Thor?”

_“Nothing yet. But from what Rocket said, it should have taken them about this long to get to Nidavellir. It’ll take a while, Steve,”_ Bruce offered apologetically. _“You’ve got Clint and Scott safe?”_

“Scott, Clint and Nate. They’re here. No interference from the government, but then again, begging forgiveness has always been a little more our style,” he answered, flicking a glance at the seats behind him. All three were dozing, drifting in and out of consciousness for lack of a better thing to do. 

Nat flicked an annoyed glance over her shoulder, and then shook herself visibly before returning her attention to the controls. 

_“I think everyone’s too busy to bother us, especially since the UN Council pretty much said they’d look the other way. It’s about time they did too,”_ he muttered. 

“How’s it going on your end?”

_“Tony’s being very Tony. I wish that Vision was here. From what Friday said, he was good at reining Tony’s work binges in and bringing him back down to Earth. That much having been said, I think we’re making progress. The last few simulations didn’t actually involve making an incidental miniature black hole that would destroy Wakanda and possibly a good portion of Africa.”_

That was a possibility? He glanced at Widow and shared an incredulous look. 

“Definite improvement,” she stated firmly, keeping her tone level even if her face shared the same disbelief.. 

The copilot’s seat seemed all the more inviting and he collapsed into it as the autopilot turned them several degrees to the left. “Bottom line, Bruce?”

_“We’ll make it happen. I know we will,” _he replied just as firmly. _“Mjolnir would help, but if you can’t get it, just let me know. Rewriting the rules of reality take time._ __

____

__

They always did. Still, he could trust that Bruce and Tony would come up with something. “Understood.”

Nat decided to close the line, after saying, “Thanks, Bruce. See you soon.” 

The looming issue had to be spoken, and Steve decided to name the elephant in the cockpit. “No one could budge Mjolnir except Thor.”

“You almost did,” Natasha pointed out.

Yes, before he’d shattered the team into its component pieces. Before he’d turned his back on what was the greater good for what he couldn’t bear to lose. He’d lost them all anyways, even Bucky. Who knew if Mjolnir would judge him as worthy now? “A lifetime ago.”

Her expression was as inscrutable as ever and her eyes carefully raked over him before she gave away any of her thoughts. Still, her voice was gentle, soothing in a way that little else was. “I don’t think you’ve changed that much, Cap,” she replied softly. “And in the very unlikely case that I’m wrong, well. We’ll work something out. We always do.”

She turned around once more, and then faced the windshield with a determined expression as if driving them into their future. “Hopefully, Thor’s coming back with an army. God knows we could use one.”

“We didn’t before.”

“We never had these odds, Steve.”

“No, I think back then, they might have been worse.” With the smile of a man who figured he would end up in the gallows, he turned back to the dawning sunrise before their eyes.

* * *

Space was a hell of a lot more silent than he had imagined. Aside from the air recyclers, the engines seemed to make no sound as the Milano moved out of the Solar System, and although he sat transfixed at the beginning, Jim started getting uneasy very quickly. 

It was a good thing, then, that he’d left with a full charge on his Stark Phone and a rather unlimited library of music. With Thor off sleeping – an unusual thing given the man’s usual exuberance – and the presence of an assassin on the ship, Jim wasn’t looking forward to a nap. Searching for one in the absence of coffee, he set it to a very low volume and then sat back in the co-pilot’s chair. 

As far as missions went, this one wasn’t inordinately complicated. He just had to wait for the demigod to talk an alien into sharing technology, assuming that one didn’t get wiped off the map by Thanos’ destructive gesture. Then get the samples, take them back to Tony. Easy. 

Except that where the Avengers were concerned, life was anything but simple. Given the sheer number of raised eyebrows he had over the years from concerned colleagues, he could hardly have missed that. Every boneheaded choice he’d made for Tony Stark since college, he had made willingly, like following a Pied Piper. This one was pretty monumental, and if he made it out this, it was definitely going in his top ten. Maybe top three.

“I was sleeping,” Rocket groused, practically stomping up into the cockpit. “What is it with you primates and music?”

Jim sighed. “I was trying not to wake you. But, to be honest, humans aren’t really good at being alone. There’s a sort of tribal instinct. Family needs to be together, you’ve got to have friends. And if you don’t have that, life gets way too quiet way too quickly. Thor’s the only person on his ship I knew before this week, and he’s not here. Did…” he trailed off, trying to remember the guy’s name respectfully.

“Quill never shut up. Has a tape-deck, I think he called it, back in his bunk. Had a couple of things what played music, but the last one probably bought it with him if your friend didn’t find it,” the raccoon declared, levering himself into the pilot’s seat. “Not exactly essential, but I don’t know if he’d be fine with knowing what happened to it. Last gift he got from the guy who should have been his father. Of course, the first twenty years or so of his life, he only had one god-damn tape, so that got real old. Same damn songs over and over and over again.”

“I’ve got thousand of songs from hundreds of albums on here, I probably only listen to about fifty in a given week. Familiar, comforting. I bet Quill felt alone for a very long time.” He fought the rising yawn, but finally gave into it, covering his mouth to be polite. 

“Not going to sleep with Nebula on board?”

Rhodes smiled, and then accepted the point. He could also have amended how tough it was to get into and out of the braces without Tony’s help, how he wouldn’t have slept anyways. It was just easier to give the least invasive reason.

“Not going to lie, neither am I. The only person we could trust to keep Nebula in check was her sister, Gamora. Any other time, we had her locked up so she wouldn’t kill us all. Maybe, and I’m going to really out on a limb here, maybe we can trust her to do it herself as long as Thanos is out there to be murdered.” Rocket sighed. “Bigger fish to fry.”

“She seems to listen to Tony,” Jim excused. “As long as Tony’s plan is working, I think she understands that we need each other. Otherwise, we’d never have been in this predicament to begin with. She’d have killed Thanos long before he came to Earth.”

Rocket pulled a face, somewhere between disgust and disbelief. “Yeah, but **why** trust him? Honestly, for a Terran he’s not too dumb, but-”

“Tony’s always been more persuasive than he had any right to be. He’s charming and he knows it. It’s how he’s kept people doing exactly what he wanted since he was a kid. Normally logical people go off their heads trying to conform to his wishes. It’s half the reason it took him so long to marry Pepper, because she wouldn’t let him win. As far as Nebula, she could have left him there on his own, to die, and Tony would still have found his way off that rock. It was probably just easier to take him than listen to him complain and then come after her and bitch later. You would not believe the amount of ridiculous shit he has talked me into over the years,” Jim replied. 

“Probably about as much as Star Lord has talked me into in the last two.” Rocket flicked a switch and put his hands on the controls. “You honestly think we have a chance of fixing this?”

“I think we’ve got the best chance in the universe.”

Silence stretched between them as Rocket chewed on the idea. “Ain’t that something to keep you up at night,” Rocket muttered, looking ahead. “Might as well crank the tunes and wake the others. We’re here.” 

As he turned the volume up, Jim could hear the first strains of The Final Countdown. With a slightly hysterical grin, he watched the eerie scene come into view. “Nidavellir,” he pronounced.

“Yeah. Let’s hope there’s someone home. Otherwise, Ravager rules apply.”

Jim flicked a confused glance at the procyonine and waited for the explanation.

“Take everything that’s not nailed down and half the things that are,” he replied. “Just don’t tell Thor. He seems like he’d be a bit perturbed by it.”

“You don’t want to see Thor angry at you, and that’s before he actually figured out how to harness lightning like he does now. He’s a good guy. But I think he grew up a lot since I first met him. Losing everything will do that,” Rhodes replied.

A meaty hand landed on his shoulder. “Not everything, friend Rhodes. Eitri may feel as though he has, however,” Thor cautioned. 

“You think he survived?”

The god shook his head. “I think Thanos had no ability to choose who did, else I would have perished. It was chance, or perhaps destiny. We know well that the Infinity Stones have a mind and heart of their own. But given the depth of Eitri’s suffering, his passing would be a kindness the universe may not bestow.” 

“Universe ain’t exactly been kind to any of us,” the raccoon groused softly. “It’d be nice if it’d save itself once in a while.”

“I wouldn’t mind being out of a job,” Jim offered gently. 

Rocket maneuvered the Milano into a landing area and a few clanks sounded their arrival. “And on that cheery fucking thought, here we are.” He bounded out of the cockpit, yelling Nebula’s name.

Jim released his harness and then stood up to be engulfed in Thor’s solid one-armed embrace. “Tis true that I have lost much, but it has given me more to fight for, and either weakness or strength can come from pain. We have chosen the same path from that crossroads, my friend. Tis not easy, but in a universe such as this it is not without company. Come, let us see if we may talk Eitri into facing this task together.”

“You mean before Rocket decides to steal him blind?”

Thor’s sheepish grin was sufficient to prod him out into a new realm.

So few humans had ventured onto other worlds that their names could fit on a single piece of paper. But this wasn’t about exploration as much as he’d joined the Air Force to push the boundaries of flight. 

These were desperate times, so he followed a demigod, an assassin and a genetically modified woodland creature in search of the universe’s greatest blacksmith. The cavernous walls spoke of creatures far larger than he, so it was strange to see that the ‘dwarf’ was actually at least nine feet tall. The echoing silence and stillness confirmed Thor’s claim that Eitri was the last. 

He tried to imagine an empty Earth and a shiver wracked his body. It was a possibility, one Tony had finally confessed to him after Ultron had come and gone.

Jim only hoped he didn’t live to see it, if it happened.

The dwarf stood, limned in the light of the dying star beyond Nidavellir’s walls. “You defeated him?” he asked of Thor, who stood closest.

Jim remained so he could keep the others within his field of view, while examining the surroundings. It was a foundry so large that Tony would have stroked out from sheer excitement under any other circumstances. Molds and crucibles lined the walls in various states of use and disrepair. 

Thor sighed and shook his head. “He gained the last of the Infinity Stones before I could stop him. Stormbreaker did great damage, but my aim was not true enough.” 

Eitri huffed in dismissal and leaned his head back against the wall. Obvious disappointment and despair washed over his face and he closed his eyes. 

“We’re trying to figure out if there’s anything else we can do,” Rocket interjected. “We have to find Thanos, but we think we can still-”

“What?” the dwarf growled. “Beat him? He slaughtered my people. And yours.”

“And half of the universe,” Jim confirmed. “Trust me, everyone had front-row seats for that one.”

Nebula cast a wary glance around the room, meeting Jim’s gaze before looking away just as quickly. 

“If the greatest weapon I have ever forged was not enough, what do you think I can do for you now, Thor Odinsson?” Eitri hissed, his voice full of irritation but also exhaustion. 

“Midgard is going to fight back, but their weapons were not enough.”

“The instant he got the Tesseract, our days were numbered,” Rocket interjected. 

A sudden gleam, like a shadow had been lifted, caught the corner of Jim’s right eye and he turned to look. Seeing nothing there, and no caution from the others, he turned back to their host. This place, like most of space, was too eerily quiet for his tastes.

“His victory is complete and you wish to fight him?” the dwarf asked. “You are a fool, Odinsson.”

“No one is a fool for fighting. It’s only a fool who fights for the wrong reason,” Jim argued, surprised at himself for jumping in. Well, hell, in for a penny, in for a pound. “There has never been a more just reason for hunting down the Mad Titan and fixing what he has destroyed. He thinks the war is over; he’s about to figure out that it’s not.”

“Your war, your revenge, is pointless,” Eitri stated. “There is no solution for this tragedy.”

“If you for a moment believed that, then after Thor left to come to Earth, you would have killed yourself,” he felt compelled to say. 

Thor startled mildly at his tone and statement. 

“I mean, let’s face it, your people are dead. Thanos slaughtered them all, didn’t he?”

A quick gesture from the demigod went unheeded as Jim advanced, watching the dwarf shift uneasily. 

Finally, the dwarf loomed over him, expression thunderous. “You understand nothing of what he has taken from me.”

“Do you understand the agony of a mother who watched her child turn to ash in her arms?” he demanded in a tone that echoed in the mausoleum of thousands of dwarves. 

Eitri fell silent, stunned into silence, or unable to fathom that horror either. 

“You’re right, I don’t know thing one about what Thanos did to you besides what Thor told me. But you don’t have a monopoly on pain, on loss, on suffering. There isn’t a person in this room who hasn’t had something taken away from them by Thanos; some more than others. It isn’t a contest about who got hurt the worst or who lost the most. It is a shared pain, if not in its depth, then in its nature. I get that, and I get that it is easier for you to roll over and die. But that is not what **we** are prepared to do, and I don’t think that’s what you’re prepared to do either.”

“He crippled me,” the dwarf protested, holding up mangled hands.

“I have been crippled too,” Jim answered. “Not by Thanos, but by my friends. But if I thought for one moment that my strength was in my legs, I’d never have walked again, let alone fought Thanos’ forces on Earth. You’re a craftsman, a blacksmith. Your ability to create and forge is not in your hands. It’s in your head; it always has been. It is in the legacy of your people, knowledge that you alone carry now. It’s in the metal you work, the weapons you have made. You honestly think that anyone else could make something to best your own work? You’re delusional.”

Rocket crossed his arms smugly, as if deciding that they were winning this particular confrontation. 

Feeling emboldened by the fact that just maybe, Rhodey was getting through to this guy too, he continued. “We **can** do this without you, but it’d be more of a snowball’s chance in Hell than we’re currently looking at. But you not being on our side anymore? That’s not going to stop Earth from taking it to him.” 

“He will do to you what he did to me.”

“He can bring it, because I swear to every god that ever lived, we are not going down without a fight,” Jim swore. “Midgard has never needed a good reason to do the right thing. We need all the help we can get, though. So even if you can’t, I need to see what we can learn before we go back home.”

“Rhodes,” Thor said slowly.

“What, Thor?” he asked, flicking a glance at the Asgardian beside him. He had been on a roll. What the hell, Thor?

“Look down.”

Six pieces of metal that had definitely **not** been there when he stood were all scattered around his feet. One was nudging his shoe and clinking softly against his braces. 

Jim peeked at Thor’s expression before leaning down to touch the metal fragment. It was smooth and warm in a way that he’d never quite felt before on an inert mineral. Although slightly smaller than the palm of his hand, it seemed like it filled the space with a weight all its own. “Where did you come from, huh?” he asked, cupping the material in his broad palm.

It gleamed with a slightly iridescent sheen and as he examined the lump, he realized the room had gone quiet. Even Eitri was considering him with an assessing gaze as though he’d never seen a human before.

Jim chuckled, and then stroked the metal with his other hand. “You were listening to me yell. Sorry about that, but you know, we didn’t come to sightsee. We’re trying to figure out how to make the universe right again. And that isn’t easy. It seems like when we get involved, it never is, but at least we’ve usually had a more cohesive plan.”

He felt, more than heard, the query that followed. “Well, we’re not always right, but we’re always pretty brave. We do our best, because we know what the consequences are. They’re days like this. Days where every breath is a hard decision to make, and every loss feels like a dagger in the heart.”

“Is he talking to shrapnel?” Nebula hissed in the background.

Another gut feeling had him saying, “All we can.”

A sense of satisfaction waved over him, and he wasn’t exactly certain that it was his own. He turned his head slightly to look at Thor, who had collected the other pieces from the floor in the interim, and held them out like he was handing over Excalibur instead of a few chunks of Uru.

“It was not my father’s enchantment that made Mjolnir only to be wielded by the worthy,” Thor explained. 

“The most opinionated metal ever mined,” Rocket answered. “God help you if you try to do something with it that it disagrees with.”

“Remind me to introduce you to Tony’s bots. Talk about having a mind of their own,” he stated absently, before looking back at the now-stunned dwarf. 

He softened his tone, because honestly, he didn’t have a reason to berate a potential ally, and he’d made his point. “Believe me, Eitri. I understand that giving up seems like the easy way out, but as a planet, we don’t sit on that. We may end up going double or nothing with Thanos, and as terrifying as the idea of losing everything we have left is, we would be willing to risk a lot to get back the people we lost. That being said? We could really do with all the friends we can get right about now. That means every last soul in this universe, and right now, that especially means you. You need hands, we’ll help. You need inspiration? We’ve got it. You just say the word and we will make the universe bend to our will. We will get retribution from Thanos and we will even the score as much as we can. We’re Avengers. It’s what we were born to do.”


End file.
